<p>I'm thinking of applying ED to CMU because i really like the college, but I plan on being an English major and I've heard bad things about their English Department. Does anyone know how good the English Department is at CMU?</p>
<p>Thanks for giving me a reason to take a look at CMU’s English department. As you know, it offers BAs in Tech Writing, Creative Writing, Professional Writing, Humanities and the Arts (one of the intercollege majors for which CMU has a reputation) and English. I’ll assume you’re asking about the last of these. Only the English looks anything like a traditional Beowulf to Virginia Woolf reading list, and even there the degree looks kind of thinly staffed. So instead of having a tenure track professor who teaches English lit from Beowulf to the Renaissance and another English lit from Modernism to Postmodernism and so forth, there is one professor who teaches modernism, African American, and mid-20thc Cold War fiction. This approach could leave large gaps in student preparation (for grad school, for instance), while at the same time offering students one or more toolkits for literary analysis in each course. There’s a focus on critical theory in the BA in English and approaching the literatures of a number of nations from a certain gendered/historical/racial/class perspective that supposedly has some homogeneity from course to course. I don’t know that this approach to the literatures is the best way to teach English, or that it’s taught successfully at CMU. I simply cannot tell from here. Below is a url where you can take a look at course offerings:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.cmu.edu/hss/english/documents/application-materials/f14-what-counts-for-what-majors.pdf”>http://www.cmu.edu/hss/english/documents/application-materials/f14-what-counts-for-what-majors.pdf</a></p>
<p>Scroll down to EBA Required Courses and you’ll get some sense of what I mean from the course titles. On one hand there are what appear to be traditional courses with titles like “The Long Eighteenth Century” and “Twentieth Century American [Literature],” and on the other hand there are titles such as “The Rise of the American University” and “The New Public Sphere.” </p>
<p>You could ask to speak to some graduates of the program. If the curriculum is successful they should have no problem putting graduates in touch with you. I should think that if you went to CMU with a broad reading of literature in English that the BA in English at CMU would be rewarding and help prepare you for grad school, if not the GRE Subject Test. </p>
<p>When my daughter considered CMU two years ago, they were pushing “getting a job doing what you major in”–so if you majored in creative writing, you would be a writer, not a teacher. We asked specifically about English and were pushed to technical writing. The feeling I got was that English, or “thinking” was not as valued as “doing.”</p>
<p>interesting, @usernamelm, thanks for that. why did your D choose not to go to CMU?</p>
<p>Oh, she was waitlisted, @jkeil911. So she didn’t have to make the choice, though she loved the geeky atmosphere there.</p>