10 Reasons to Major in English 📝

Hi, I'm Kay Choi. Welcome to my channel. As you may know because I've mentioned it in videos in the past, I majored in English during college. I feel like English majors often get a bad rap and people think that they are just not going to have any work. They're just going to be unemployed after they graduate and that their majors are useless, especially when compared to science, technology, and engineering majors. I somewhat agree, like there have definitely been times when I wished I majored in computer science or engineering over English, but at the end of the day, I am very grateful that I majored in English and I wouldn't change it for anything. So in this video, I wanted to share 10 reasons you should major in English. The number one reason for me is that you develop writing skills and writing skills are so important in any job that you do. I feel that when you learn how to write, then you learn how to speak and communicate and it just makes you a better worker in whatever job you have. And you not only develop these writing skills because you have to write a lot of essays as an English major, but also because you have to read a lot. And so it's something that even after you graduate, you can continue to develop because you can continue to read even if you're not writing essays all the time. There are also so many jobs that you can get with an English degree contrary to popular belief. So the most obvious ones are you could become a teacher, you could go to law school, you could continue to study English and become a professor. You could go into publishing, you could become a journalist. If you saw one of my recent videos, you can work in PR like I did or you can go into marketing, social media, grant writing, copywriting. You could even go into politics and you can also go to med school if you wanted to. I read an article at one point about how med schools are actually looking for people who do not have a science degree, but a humanities degree. If I could find it, I'll link it in the description box below. Going back to my first point, I think that those writing skills that you develop as an English major are important in all of those fields, even in medicine. When you're an English major, you will probably have a lot of friends asking you to read and edit their essays or personal statements and this I actually love doing. I always did it for free, but you could, I guess, charge a little if you wanted to. But also the people that I would read essays for, oftentimes they would offer to buy me a meal, which goes a long way when you're a college student. I think that as an English major, you have less rote memorization that you have to do. I feel like when I saw my science major friends studying for exams, they had to do all this memorization, depending on what the subject was, like probably for biology, they had to memorize a lot of things. As an English major, you do have to memorize to some extent. I remember having to memorize quotes and things like that, but there aren't these lists of terms that you have to memorize and then use or regurgitate for your exams. On a related note, there were a lot of semesters in college where I didn't have final exams, at least not for my English classes. And this is because I would often have final essays and those prompts were given a couple weeks before the end of the semester, and they were often due before finals week. So there were a lot of times when I was actually done with my semester a week earlier than all of my friends and roommates, and that is always a really good feeling. One thing I really appreciated as an English major was that my classes were not usually as competitive as my friends' classes who are in other majors. And that's because we didn't really have final exams, we had essays, and then the grades were not curved. This meant that my grade did not depend on how the rest of the class did on the essay or the test. Whatever grade I got was the grade I got. Going along with that, I guess the downside is that the grading is subjective instead of objective because it's writing and essays instead of facts and figures. But I think overall, I found my grades and everything to be less stressful just because it wasn't on a curve. I always got props from people for being an English major because they would say, I can never be an English major, I can never do that much writing. And I would say it back to them, because I don't think I could have been an engineer or a computer science major or a math major or a science major or almost anything other than English. But it was nice because despite there being this wide misconception that an English degree is useless, I still met lots of people who appreciated and respected my choice and my degree. The books that you buy as an English major are probably cheaper than the books that you buy as a biology major because you don't have to buy this huge textbook that is probably over $100, but maybe you have to buy five books that are $10 each. It depends. Some classes, you have to buy a lot of books and it probably adds up. But I just think in general, it hurts a little less when you're buying novels instead of these huge textbooks that you might not ever read again. Also, you can study abroad in England and it's usually really easy to do that and transfer whatever classes you take abroad to your major. That was what I did. I was able to count the two classes I took at Bristol when I studied abroad for a semester towards my English degree. Other majors, of course, can study abroad too, but I just think that it's a really good fit with English majors to be able to study abroad in England where so many literary greats have lived and it's usually really easy to transfer those classes, as I said. And there are lots of celebrities and famous people who have majored in English. I don't know if this is necessarily a reason to study English, but it could be encouraging to see that you could be successful with an English major in a multitude of fields. A lot of them are actors like Emma Watson. You have Chris Pine and John Cho, who both went to Berkeley, actually. Go Bears. And Chris Pine studied abroad in England for a year. Conan O'Brien was an English major. You have novelists like Toni Morrison and Amy Tan. Directors like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. John Wooden, who was an amazing basketball coach at UCLA. And my math teacher in high school used to have John Wooden quotes all over our classroom. So he has a special place in my heart. And then even Sally Ride, who was an astronaut, majored in English. If you go online, you can find lots and lots of lists of famous people and successful people who are English majors. And I think it's inspiring, again, to see how you could be successful in so many different fields with this degree. That's it for this video. I hope you enjoyed. If you are trying to figure out what to major in when you go to college, I hope this helps you a little bit. If you're an English major right now and are feeling discouraged about the job market after you graduate, I hope this encourages you as well. Comment below with what you are studying in college or uni right now or are planning to study because I would love to know. As always, thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one. Bye.