Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
One other thing. If you're an English major (or ANY humanities major), and want to avoid the academic/law school route, here are several courses that would be worth your time:
-- 1 or 2 basic business courses. If you're a freelancer and understand business, you'll be amazed at how many doors open for you.
-- Public speaking. Quite possibly the most valuable college course I ever took. With a good teacher, you'll learn how to interact with an audience, how to express yourself clearly, and how to present subject matter. I use it almost every day.
-- Foreign language. Get really proficient in one. Your stock will shoot up immeasurably.
Thankfully, the college I'm attending now places a huge emphasis on public speaking and business. I consider myself to be an excellent public speaker and will use it as my largest bargaining chip when entering the job markets of the world. Unfortunately, foreign language skills are something I know nothing about.
Like many college students, I'm preparing to graduate and enter the wonderful,curious,and frustrated real world. I will be graduating with a Bachelor's in English. Prior to going to school, I had strong aspirations of either: a.going to grad school, receiving a ph.d down the road, and teaching literature at the post-high school level or b. going to law school and hoping it would open a larger job market for me (which I've been told is a myth for law grads). I still have a desire to do this, and possibly down the road I will, but I've hit a large speed bump - I'm burned out on school! Do I have a shot at landing a decent job with my degree or are the myths about majoring in English that my guidance counselors in high school warned me about coming true? If it's any help in responding, I'll have roughly a 3.0 gpa upon graduating.
I hate to be the negative one, but here is a different perspective for you. All the replys have been from people who seem quite old (no offense). So YES, 20 years ago when they graduated they could do just about anything with their English degree and have aquired various skills over the years.
HOWEVER, today is a different story. Mostly everyone now has a degree and going to college is becoming the norm. The job market is more competitive. You have to diversify your skill set to become competitive.
Now we have majors just for about ebery job imaginable. If you wnat to work in advertising then you major in advertising. If you want to work in human resources then you major in human resource management. JUST an English degree with no little experience isnt going to get you a job. I'm sorry to break it to you.
I hate to be the negative one, but here is a different perspective for you. All the replys have been from people who seem quite old (no offense). So YES, 20 years ago when they graduated they could do just about anything with their English degree and have aquired various skills over the years.
HOWEVER, today is a different story. Mostly everyone now has a degree and going to college is becoming the norm. The job market is more competitive. You have to diversify your skill set to become competitive.
Now we have majors just for about ebery job imaginable. If you wnat to work in advertising then you major in advertising. If you want to work in human resources then you major in human resource management. JUST an English degree with no little experience isnt going to get you a job. I'm sorry to break it to you.
Yeah I understand what you mean. There's even a golf course management major at my university: It's that specific. I take your response as more realism and cynicism. In fact, I made this post primarily because I'm afraid of running into everything you're saying in the near future.
Just this morning, I stumbled onto an ad for a job. The NC Bar Association is looking for a clerk/receptionist, part time, who is adept with general good manners, mostly on the telephone, and is fluent in both English and Spanish. I wish the demand had been for French -- I'd have applied.
I still contend you are only limited by a degree so far as your imagination is limited.
While degrees become more and more specific, there is still demand for people who can do more than one thing. Imagine where the fellow with a degree in golf course management, and electives in business management, and fluency in a foreign language, could go.
Don't overlook the non-profit sector. There is no lack of opportunity at nonprofits for people who can express themselves proficiently both verbally and in writing. The English degree doubles as a well-rounded education that helps when working at nonprofits. The variety is endless -- event planning, proposal writing, individual donor relations, marketing and PR, etc.
I hate to be the negative one, but here is a different perspective for you. All the replys have been from people who seem quite old (no offense). So YES, 20 years ago when they graduated they could do just about anything with their English degree and have aquired various skills over the years.
HOWEVER, today is a different story. Mostly everyone now has a degree and going to college is becoming the norm. The job market is more competitive. You have to diversify your skill set to become competitive.
Now we have majors just for about ebery job imaginable. If you wnat to work in advertising then you major in advertising. If you want to work in human resources then you major in human resource management. JUST an English degree with no little experience isnt going to get you a job. I'm sorry to break it to you.
Total baloney. To be honest with you, I've found that, unless you have a specialized degree such as Electrical Engineering or Accounting, your choice of a degree simply doesn't matter 10 years down the road.
What's more, what I've also found is that those highly-specific degrees can actually put you at a severe disadvantage in the market several years into your career, chiefly because the degree program is very limited in what it teaches. So, if you're a person with a degree in human resources or advertising or hotel management, and you decide you don't like your career choice by the time you're in your late 20s, you're pretty much screwed. I know a lot of lawyers and accountants and programmers in their late 30s and early 40s who hate what they do, but feel that's the only option they have.
On the other hand, AT&T did a long-term tracking survey of how people with various degrees fared over the long haul in their careers. What it found was that people with humanities degrees suffered in the short term, but actually did better in terms of salary and career advancement once they reached their thirties. The reason? Humanities teach skills such as critical thinking, communication, and the ability to collect, process, and synthesize large amounts of highly abstract information.
And, as an aside, I've worked in advertising for 20 years, and very few of the top people actually have advertising degrees. The people with degrees in advertising typically wind up in the bottom feeder positions such as selling radio time. Go figure.
Total baloney. To be honest with you, I've found that, unless you have a specialized degree such as Electrical Engineering or Accounting, your choice of a degree simply doesn't matter 10 years down the road.
What's more, what I've also found is that those highly-specific degrees can actually put you at a severe disadvantage in the market several years into your career, chiefly because the degree program is very limited in what it teaches. So, if you're a person with a degree in human resources or advertising or hotel management, and you decide you don't like your career choice by the time you're in your late 20s, you're pretty much screwed. I know a lot of lawyers and accountants and programmers in their late 30s and early 40s who hate what they do, but feel that's the only option they have.
On the other hand, AT&T did a long-term tracking survey of how people with various degrees fared over the long haul in their careers. What it found was that people with humanities degrees suffered in the short term, but actually did better in terms of salary and career advancement once they reached their thirties. The reason? Humanities teach skills such as critical thinking, communication, and the ability to collect, process, and synthesize large amounts of highly abstract information.
And, as an aside, I've worked in advertising for 20 years, and very few of the top people actually have advertising degrees. The people with degrees in advertising typically wind up in the bottom feeder positions such as selling radio time. Go figure.
I don't know if this is quite total baloney. JaxMover's point has some validity - 20 years ago, there was a certain level of opportunity for anyone with a bachelor's degree regardless of undergraduate major, so people who graduated from college during that time (like yourself, as you've noted that you've worked in advertising for 20 years) have the perspective that a humanities degree can be relatively easy to apply to many industries. However, that's not necessarily true for college graduates today. As someone that has graduated from college and law school in recent years, a bachelor's degree is much more of a commodity in today's world, which means that employers are going to take a harder look at undergraduate majors. Anyone can point to a random story here or there about an English major that made a great living in [fill in the blank] industry, but random stories are not trends. Certainly, there are particular industries outside of education that hire humanities majors (such as publishers), but there are many more humanities majors graduating than there are those types of jobs available. Contrast this to the general sectors that have the most short and long-term career prospects - finance, information technology and health care - which almost always target specific majors outside of the humanities.
Also, those oft-cited studies about better long-term salaries for humanities majors are a bit skewed since a disproportionate number of those people received JDs and MBAs. That means that their increased income is more of a result of obtaining degrees and training outside of the humanities (as opposed to being directly correlated to having a humanities background). Further note that these studies were done using a population sample from an era when having a college degree wasn't the commodity that it is today - I think you'll see very different long-term results when you compare humanities majors versus business and engineering majors that graduated this century. This isn't to say that a humanities background can't be valuable from a personal enrichment standpoint, but the reality is that it's much tougher for an English major to get a job out of undergrad outside of teaching (and even that can be pretty tough) than it was 20 years ago when there were fewer college grads competing in the marketplace.
I don't know if this is quite total baloney. JaxMover's point has some validity - 20 years ago, there was a certain level of opportunity for anyone with a bachelor's degree regardless of undergraduate major, so people who graduated from college during that time (like yourself, as you've noted that you've worked in advertising for 20 years) have the perspective that a humanities degree can be relatively easy to apply to many industries. However, that's not necessarily true for college graduates today. As someone that has graduated from college and law school in recent years, a bachelor's degree is much more of a commodity in today's world, which means that employers are going to take a harder look at undergraduate majors. Anyone can point to a random story here or there about an English major that made a great living in [fill in the blank] industry, but random stories are not trends. Certainly, there are particular industries outside of education that hire humanities majors (such as publishers), but there are many more humanities majors graduating than there are those types of jobs available. Contrast this to the general sectors that have the most short and long-term career prospects - finance, information technology and health care - which almost always target specific majors outside of the humanities.
Also, those oft-cited studies about better long-term salaries for humanities majors are a bit skewed since a disproportionate number of those people received JDs and MBAs. That means that their increased income is more of a result of obtaining degrees and training outside of the humanities (as opposed to being directly correlated to having a humanities background). Further note that these studies were done using a population sample from an era when having a college degree wasn't the commodity that it is today - I think you'll see very different long-term results when you compare humanities majors versus business and engineering majors that graduated this century. This isn't to say that a humanities background can't be valuable from a personal enrichment standpoint, but the reality is that it's much tougher for an English major to get a job out of undergrad outside of teaching (and even that can be pretty tough) than it was 20 years ago when there were fewer college grads competing in the marketplace.
Good points all, but the original nonsense that I was refuting was the statement that it's impossible. Look, 25 years ago, everybody was making the same arguments, and they were proven wrong.
Are you interested in journalism? That's a great route for English majors. You could be an editor, proofreader, reporter, etc. at magazines, newspapers or a book publishing company.
Or what about any kind of job in the non-profit sector? Program assistant, etc. kinds of jobs can be found in a variety of non-profits.
Are you thinking about grad school? Because English majors can apply to any type of grad school--you're not just limited to law or English grad school. Think about other fields you're interested in. How about medicine or dentistry? Vet school? You'd need to take some pre-med pre-reqs for those, but it can be done. What about a career in the health care field? There are so many interesting careers in the health care field, including speech/language pathologists, physician assistant, etc. You can be any major and just take your pre-reqs to enter those fields.
Are you interested in journalism? That's a great route for English majors. You could be an editor, proofreader, reporter, etc. at magazines, newspapers or a book publishing company.
Or what about any kind of job in the non-profit sector? Program assistant, etc. kinds of jobs can be found in a variety of non-profits.
Are you thinking about grad school? Because English majors can apply to any type of grad school--you're not just limited to law or English grad school. Think about other fields you're interested in. How about medicine or dentistry? Vet school? You'd need to take some pre-med pre-reqs for those, but it can be done. What about a career in the health care field? There are so many interesting careers in the health care field, including speech/language pathologists, physician assistant, etc. You can be any major and just take your pre-reqs to enter those fields.
That's a great point. I definitley am interested in journalism as well as a lot of other fields.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
