Well, I’m a History major too.
But, if anyone ever needs a great production manager, especially in the field of bike helmet manufacture, I am their guy.
See, your major doesn’t make too much difference in what you can end up doing, unless you let it of course.
English/Creative Writing majors…we can do great resumes and we can make you suspend disbelief to hire us for virtually any job we want 
.
Oh, yes! I think acearle is going to fit in here quite nicely.
Welcome. I haven’t seen you around much, but I am beginning to enjoy reading what you have to write.
Keep it up
As an English major, I’ve heard this discussion many times. Many of the English grads I knew worked in local restaurants. One of my profs explained to us that PhD stands for pile it higher and deeper or post hole digger. I read What Color is Your Parachute in the late '80s and perused the job listings at our university career center looking for jobs for English majors. Back then I pretty much concluded that available jobs were mostly either technical writer or teacher. I took another route, heading back to school for a law degree. While any major is appropriate as a background for law and my classmates had every background imaginable, I felt that English was a great pre-law major. After all, the main skills of practicing law are reading, writing, speaking and thinking (that and lying convincingly). I’m very happy I was an English major. How boring to have taken the “practical route” and studied Business. A bachelor’s degree alone doesn’t make much difference anyway (what work can you find with a BA in German, History or Art History?), so one might as well study something enjoyable. Besides, I do believe that the reading, writing, speaking and thinking skills that one develops as an English major ought to be marketable.
On the other hand, if one is seeking a professor position, my prof may have been right about the meaning of PhD. My roommate and fellow English major went off and earned a PhD. He’s very bright and has been published a fair amount. But upon completing his PhD the only teaching position he could find was at Valdosta Georgia, not exactly the top of his list. He took the job and hated life in such a red-neck backwater location (his description, not mine). His work also sounded tough, constantly being pressured to publish and to attend endless committee meetings (plus being assigned the worst classes of course). He’s now moved on to a better school in a better location (California) but it still sounds like hard work being a prof, with all the political bullshit in the uni and in the state govt (terrible budget cuts).
"The Modern Language Association counted only 431 tenure-track English jobs landed in 2001, compared with 977 English Ph.D.s granted. One 1999 study found that only 53% of students who received their English doctorates between 1983 and 1985 were tenured professors by 1995. A mere 8% were tenured professors at “Carnegie Research I institutions”
Yeah, the academic market sucks. From anecdotal evidence, it seems that for every position open at a college there are at least 200 applicants. I’ve seen Phds. in Philosophy working as bookstore clerks because they couldn’t find anything better.
Oh, yes! I think acearle is going to fit in here quite nicely.
Welcome. I haven’t seen you around much, but I am beginning to enjoy reading what you have to write.
Keep it up[/quote]
Thanks, Bassman…being a bit twisted, I dunno 
, so far I haven’t been banned from too many forums, though 
. I take it you play bass?
I’ve seen similar things said about philosophy–philosophy majors have the highest LSAT, GRE, etc scores of any major. I agree with you. Never, ever believe that crap about how liberal arts degrees are what employers are looking for. There are no doubt exceptions, but the vast majority of people teaching English are liberal arts, and not science or engineering grads. The foreign folk teaching at universities here teach in liberal arts and humanities departments, not science, engineering or business.
Bad investment all around. Don’t study history. Don’t study languages. Don’t study linguistics. It’ll only get on welfare (in those places where there still is welfare).
Study what you are interested in. If you slog through a course when your heart’s not really in it you 'll have a miserable four years and end up disillusioned.
Ultimately, it’s your people skills, your personality, that will get you a job. Your degree certificate is just your ticket to the door - the rest is up to you.
[quote]If you slog through a course when your heart’s not really in it you 'll have a miserable four years and end up disillusioned.
[/quote]
Or a bitter accountant for the DOD, feeling washed up at the ripe old age of 24. Cut Lich some slack – look at what the poor bastard has to do for a living after coming in top 5 at some uberschool in the US. Read his posts – he claims to have interned as a writer for the Economist, obviously failed to make the cut and ended up a DOD bean-counter. No wonder he’s bitter.
On the other hand, maybe he actually chose his DOD job :shock:, which would simply make him a boring asstard. Funny posts, though – by an accountant’s standards, at least.
Accountant for the DOD. Lich, you must have people skills and personality up the wazoo, even though you camouflage them so well here.
Like one of my college teachers said to me when I was looking at grad schools, in the field of English it really doesn’t matter which university you go to, because they have books everywhere. Whether you’re a success in the field of study of literature depends on how much and what you read - creative writing and literature are self-taught disciplines, moreso than other academic fields of study. I mean, you may have a degree in English Lit from Harvard, but haven’t read the complete novels of Tolstoy nor can quote lines of Shakespeare from memory, unlike that grad from the University of Southern Mississippi at Kalamazoo. It may be different for Science or Engineering grads, but a degree is just a piece of paper for liberal arts grads. It doesn’t necessarily say anything about your abilities, knowledge, or talent.
When I studied Eng Lit at uni, you didn’t really have to attend any lectures at all if you didn’t want to. You simply had to know your stuff inside out and be able to discuss it intelligently in coursework and end of year exams.
Not so with science degrees - you are supposed to attend every lecture so that you can note down, memorize and regurgitate verbatim everything that your professor tells you. No real thinking or discussion is required to get a science degree.
Obviously I am exaggerating here but I hope you see my point.
Well, I suppose a serious answer to the thread might be in order. What did I do after 4 years in an English/Creative Writing department? The short list is writer, musician, photographer, teacher, business owner…whatever really caught my interest at the time. It isn’t the degree, it is who you are and what you can do. I’ve always gravitated toward the creative side of life, never had much patience for structure or the corporate world (in spite of spending 10 miserable years split between 3 
). What COULD I offer an employer if I were ever so inclined to work for one again? Fresh views on whatever project they happen to be working on…an ability to turn an in-a-rut project on its ear and either revitalize it or kill it. Is this a result a college English program, or did I chose the English program to suit my particular madness? I dunno, what came first, the chicken or the egg. An awful lot of people I went to college with ended up getting teaching certificates and going into elementary or secondary ed. In fact, ONE of them is actually happy doing it…really, the degree is irrelevant, its the person holding it .
The egg. I thought everyone knew that.
But I agree with you about the degree.
[quote=“ImaniOU”][b][color=red]Jobs for a linguistics major:
ESL teacher…EFL teacher…IELTS examiner…IELTS tutor…TOEFL examiner…TOEFL tutor…researcher…linguistics professor…theses proofreader…taxi driver…car washer…dish dryer…waiter…garbage collector…perpetual student…mime…[/color][/b][/quote]
Don’t forget accent training. 
Actually, I’ve known a lot of former linguistics majors to go on to law school (not surprising, considering the language analysis skills required for it).
(Re: Mod_lang: Kalamazoo is in Michigan – only Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo Community College, and Western Michigan University are there, that I recall. USM is in Hattiesburg. They’re all great kids there. )
flibbertigibbet, who is replying to this only because she likes to write the name “Kalamazoo”