What Kind of English Major Are You?

One of the great things about majoring in English is that there are so many different ways to do it. 

According to University of Bridgeport Department Chair Dr. Randy Laist, “English is different from other disciplines because the content, the knowledge, is less important than the learner.  This means that ‘studying English’ or ‘majoring in English’ can look very different from one student to another, because there’s so much intellectual flexibility and so much personalization according to the interests and goals of individual students.  That’s what I love about it.”

Dr. Laist says that although English majors are typically distinguished by their individuality, they tend to gravitate toward certain key ideals that can be generally taxonomized as follows.  

The Empath

You thrive in the space between different perspectives.  You have a gift for seeing other people’s points of view.  You see people in terms of the stories they tell themselves, the stories other people tell about them, and the intersecting stories that you all live within.  Reading stories and writing out your thoughts helps you to understand other people and yourself more clearly.  In any collaborative environment, these qualities make you indispensable to your team. 

The Communicator

You have a gift for expressing yourself in ways that get people’s attention.  You enjoy the spontaneity of interpersonal encounters, especially when you have a fun and interesting idea to share, a joke to tell, or a funny topic for conversation to introduce.  Writing and producing cross-media content in your English classes helps you to develop your gift for communicating and can even help launch your career as a social media influencer, online marketing content creator, or business owner.

The Creative

You can’t help it.  Your brain is filled with stories, funny rhymes, crazy ideas, ironic turns of phrase.  When you look out at the world, what you see shapes itself into fantastic pictures, sad tapestries, visionary moments.  Sometimes you think you’re weird.  Sometimes you think you have a superpower.  Your work as an English major puts you into communication with the other tortured geniuses of human history and teaches you how to control and channel your superpower.    

The Detective

The world seems like it’s full of clues.  The books you read, the movies you see, the internet videos you watch – it’s like they’re all trying to say something, something about who we are, who we want to be, the nature of our possibilities and blind spots.  Somewhere in all the streaming data lies the pattern, the overwhelming truth hiding in plain sight, coded in words and imagery in The Bible, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, in the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper.  Being an English major vindicates your paranoia.  It gives you maps that help you excavate the mystery of our everyday reality.

The Utopian

You know that our lives and our dreams are defined by the stories we tell, the words we use, the rhetorical contexts that frame discourse.  You perceive a beautiful future where human beings devote themselves to respecting each other’s stories and exploring the rich narrative tapestries that constitute cultural, spiritual, regional identities, while at the same time inviting them all into a global dialogue of shared humanity.  Your studies as an English major immerse you in the cross-currents of human self-expression that have shaped our reality for a million years, and they empower you to work collaboratively for a better future where identities and narratives and languages thrive in a vibrant dynamic of pluralistic symbiosis.

The Story-master

You are a living repository of stories: movies, comic books, old TV shows, ancestral myths, celebrity gossip.  Since the dawn of time, there has been that person sitting by the fire, that prophetic figure, telling the stories, passing them down to the next generation, explaining their meaning.  Indeed, this may be what the dawn of time is, the time when people started telling stories and passing them on.  If the presence of the Story-master is elemental to the existence of history and humanity as we know it, then, you reflect, there might be a good amount of job security in this line of work. 

Of course, these qualities mingle and blend with one another in infinite ways, and there are hundreds of other kinds of English majors beyond this sampling.  But one thing that they all have in common is that they are committed to cultivating the things that make us human – the stories, the words, the perspectives, the themes that constitute our shared narrative as a global society and as an ever-evolving form of life. 

In a world where AI programs can replicate a wide variety of technical tasks, the most valuable skill of the future will be the ability to be human: to share stories, to imagine new ways of thinking, and to express the infinite variety of human possibilities. 

Learn more about majoring in English here, or email Dr. Laist at rlaist@bridgeport.edu.