Dear aspiring English Major,
Our minds are wired a little different. Every day and every hour our minds are running with ideas, some connected to others, and some of those ideas make it to paper. We live in different worlds. We live in the same world.
As you approach college, there will be many people that tell you your mind is not strong enough. It's just not good enough for college, because English is an easy degree.
"If you're not going to be a teacher, you won’t make any money."
"English is a useless degree, it's so simple."
I'm telling you what I have heard all year long from people aspiring to be engineering majors, nursing majors, or medicine majors. None of that stuff is true, so please don't think your mind is any less sharp than it is. Those people that doubted me from the beginning are now not attending the same college, have changed their major, or want me to proof read their papers for an "easy" English class that they can't seem to pass.
In your journey as a beginning English major, you're going to face many challenges. Almost everyone you meet will be against the idea of you aspiring to become an English major. Please do not give up on what you want to do. After being in the program for only a semester, I have realized multiple career assets an English major could pursue. Even better, some of these assets have the same starting salary as an engineering major. One example of this is grant writing, which has a starting salary of $120,000 near my location.
Follow an English degree, and fight to prove those people wrong. What a lot of those people don't realize is that someone had to write the books they're studying for their majors. There are so many cool things you could do, and so many cool things that you might even love. Even if it's not something like grant writing or writing people's textbooks, that’s fine as well. If you aspire to be an editor, author, or whatever you want under an English degree, please pursue it, and be the best one you can be. Take every new opportunity to put your work out there, and receive all sorts of feedback. Learn more aspects about your writing ability, and explore them. Someone will love what you wrote, and others will hate it so much that they’ll give you even more power to try harder. Above everything else, prove those that doubted you wrong, and believe that you can do it.
Sincerely your fellow English Major,
Kendall Johnson
