<p>I love my English class in in my high school roght now, and I can't stand my Trig or Chemistry class. This leads me to believe an English major would be the right one for me in college.</p>
<p>What I'm asking is, is majoring in English a good idea? My dream would be to make it as a novelist, a screen writer, or a journalist for a magazine, but I realize that my chances of doing this are close to nil. </p>
<p>What else could I do with an English major?</p>
<p>1) You might enjoy philosophy, comparative literature, foreign language, classics, etc. too.
2) You don’t have to major in English to be a novelist or screenwriter. I’m not so sure about journalism.</p>
<p>Tons of stuff? Any job that doesn’t require you to do math, science, or anything else technical. Sales comes to mind. Anything that requires good writing and communication skill. You could do PR work. Write press releases. Write speaches. The list goes on.</p>
<p>English is a stupid and useless major</p>
<p>Horrible choice</p>
<p>Not true, it doesn’t prepare you any better or any worse than any other writing intensive humanities major.</p>
<p>A lot of careers don’t really rely on what major you were. You can learn on the job or be trained. I have heard of plenty of business people who were English majors.</p>
<p>It’s too early for you to decide. Once you get into college, you’ll have to take different disciplines. You might end up loving your English classes, you might end up hating them. After a semester or two of various humanities classes, you should have a better idea.</p>
<p>Why do you think your chances of being a novelist, screenwriter or journalist are close to nil? You’re in high school, you can become pretty much anything you want to be, and if that’s what you want to be then you’ll probably find a way of doing it. You have so many opportunities and discoveries ahead of you, mess around, make mistakes, have fun, learn things…</p>
<p>The thing about being a novelist or a screenwriter or a journalist is that it doesn’t really matter what you study in college; in fact, it doesn’t even matter if you go to college or not. All three of those professions were traditionally peopled by high school graduates, unless you want to write novels like Umberto Eco does or something. And I bet Umberto Eco would agree with me that college isn’t all-essential to those careers (well, maybe journalism, or most forms of journalism, would be the exception… you’d at least have to get your foot in the door with a degree).</p>
<p>Conclusion: study what fascinates you, or what challenges you… not necesarily what you would be good at. I want to be a novelist too, and thought I wanted to be an English major in undergrad but ended up studying Law (I come from a country where you can major in Law in undergrad). George Eliot said a writer is someone who enlarges the sympathies of readers and that is their ultimate moral mandate, and I agree with her. So to enlarge someone’s sympathy you have to be able to understand them at a deeply emotional and intellectual level… J. K. Rowling gave an amazing commencement speech at Harvard about how working at Amnesty International changed the way she saw the world, and consequently how she wrote. So as a learning writer making decisions like this, you have to keep asking yourself… how is this going to help me understand others, and the world others live in? (As opposed to How is this going to help me get into law school, How is this going to translate into lots of money, How is this going to look good on my resume, etc.) You may end up studying anything and everything… and you’ll probably turn out fine no matter what.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>thank you all!</p>
<p>I do not have ready quotes at hand, but I remember many authors saying that if you want to write, don’t major in English.</p>
<p>The problem with majoring in English is that you’ll be reading books with an English major’s critical eye, not with a novelist’s eye. You’ll be assigned so much reading that you don’t get to experience the books and their language appreciatively, which is what an aspiring writer should do. And a novelist should equip him/herself with knowledge. I can think of countless other majors that does a better job at this than English.</p>
<p>Of course, all these are debatable. I’m not an aspiring writer, but this is what I think of my English classes.</p>
<p>Well, if you ask some of the resident humanities majors with opinions on his subject, for instance molly4190, you’re likely to get the response that you can do many things for a career that don’t necessarily relate to your college experience.</p>
<p>As you correctly assessed, many of the careers that would sort of “naturally” follow from being an English majors are very tough to make it in. Academia is rough, for instance. So keep a watch – you can do lots of things, for instance go to law school. Maybe double major in a more practical field like economics. Don’t close yourself into English unless you have a burning desire to be an academic, or whatever other career paths it leads naturally into.</p>