English Department
...What will you do with an English major? Anything. Everything. You’ll better understand the seeds of creativity and how they’re made to flower. You’ll swim in a borderless sea of thoughts beautifully expressed, ideas precisely articulated, words put into the service of emotions. The wetter you get, the more expert you’ll be at shaping stories, at persuading, and I can’t imagine any profession or any world in which better communicators aren’t better off.
Besides, literature isn’t just fancy language and tall tales. It’s a library of verities given unignorable and unforgettable form. It’s Pilates for emotional intelligence. Think about how often, in discussions of political figures, Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies, noblemen and fools serve as reference points and Rosetta stones. Or how frequently, over recent decades, George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” come up. So many of the warnings we should heed — and so much of the wisdom we need — are in those pages and those plays. How does anyone major in anything other than English?
