I want to become an English Professor as a transfer. However, I’m not sure what major I need specifically. Ignorantly I thought the major was only English B.A and going into school UC or Cal State applications there was more like English- English Education, English-Literary studies etc… So what I am asking is what major do I need to become an English professor?
You need a doctorate for starters.
That would be for graduate. I’m talking the beginning for application. (or the timeline per say) Please be more specific.
A bachelor’s degree in English or American literature builds the critical thinking and writing skills needed to pursue that career.
Then a graduate-level education in English, creative writing or composition and rhetoric is required for this profession. An individual who has earned a master’s degree is qualified to teach English at a community college.
Generally, a doctoral degree is required to work as a full-time, tenure-track university English professor.
For the Cal states Undergrad use this link to see the available majors at each campus: http://degrees.calstate.edu/search-results/all/all/all/all?areaofstudy=English
For the UC’s, use this link to check each UC campus for the what English majors are available: https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/majors/
It grieves me to write this, but the goal of becoming an English professor is similar to the goal of becoming a professional basketball player or a movie star: obviously there are people who succeed, but they are very few and very far between.
English PhDs take a long time- figure 6 years (in the US- 4 in Europe). After you complete the PhD - if you are lucky- you get a tenure-track Assistant Prof job, with a 2-4 year contract. There is a review around year 3; if that is successful you get another 2-4 year contract to bring you up to year 6. Around year 6 you come up for tenure. You submit a tenure file (your teaching record and evaluations, your publications, LoRs from outside the university attesting to your standing in the field and a record of your contributions to the department -ie, all the ‘extra’ work of committees, advising, etc). There is a formal department evaluation and typically an interview. All going well, you are now a Professor.
On the biggest site for academic job postings there are currently 28 Tenure-track English Assistant Prof positions open in the entire US:
https://careers.insidehighered.com/jobs/english-literature-and-composition/tenured-and-tenure-track/
Having played this game, I can tell you that almost certainly some of these are not ‘real’ openings- the university is indeed hiring, but they already have a preferred candidate, and they are just posting & interviewing to meet hiring requirements.
Check out this article from last September on the challenges that English PhD grads from Columbia University were having getting jobs: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2019/09/30/why-are-there-so-many-marginally-employed-phds-in-english/#6702f6671ab9
You can get lectureships and adjunct teaching positions more easily- but adjunct teaching is the equivalent of 19thC piecework: it is very hard to earn a living being an adjunct. There is no job security, no benefits, no support from the university, and the pay is terrible. Lectureships are better- but hard to find, and the contracts are not that long and not that great.
Anyway, that’s a lot of rain for one parade.
In the short term, you will want to work on what you want your area of specialization to be. Here is an article that looks at what sub-fields are hot right now. Of course, in 10 years (which is when you would be looking) what’s hot and what’s not may well have changed.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-we-hire-in-now-english-by-the-grim-numbers/?cid=gen_sign_in
English education is what you study if you want to be an English teacher, perhaps in middle or high school. OP, you could look at the faculty websites in various college English departments to see what those profs majored in college.
The market is very bad - last year Columbia University had 19 PhD students on the market and none of them got traditional tenure track professor jobs.
But some English professors are hired for their successful books, stories, and don’t have PhDs.
Even if all 28 are “real”, that number is only about 2% of the number of English language and literature/letters doctoral degrees conferred each year: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_324.10.asp?current=yes
Thank you for your response!
So what are some things that a English major graduate can do to support himself? My son wants to major in English. So I’ll let him go “find himself”, Lol. I’m hoping that once he’s in college, he’ll find an interest in one of the fields with real paying jobs and at least minor in those fields.
I hire English majors all the time for corporate roles. The obvious ones are communication related- public relations, marketing, shareholder relations, speechwriting, internal communications (I’ve worked for companies with big teams who write and produce newsletters, the company magazine). Less obvious but a great fit- Human Resources, anything project management related (someone has to translate between the IT teams and the users, with clear and direct communication).
I’ve worked for CEO’s who were English or literature majors- they got an MBA after a few years of working post undergrad.
I think as long as you make it clear that you expect him to get a job after he graduates he’ll figure it out. And make sure that he takes the “holy trinity” for humanities majors- 1 semester of micro, one semester of macro, and one statistics class. If he took AP Stats in HS he should take the second year in college.
The most gifted writer I ever hired could have passed for an economist (he wasn’t, he just knew the basics and was insanely analytical.) Could read a 400 page report with dense statistics and extract the three things our CEO needed to know- and then could turn it around into a fantastic speech which sounded just like the CEO had written it himself.
That’s what English majors can do!
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Probably one of the more obviously major-related jobs is high school English teacher. This would obviously mean taking whatever is needed for teacher credentialing alongside the English major courses.
Other related jobs would communication / writing type jobs in business, as mentioned above. Realize that writing about business topics may have some differences from writing about literature.
Not all business writing is about “business topics”. A versatile corporate writer needs to be able to compose in different “voices” on a wide range of subjects- the arts, the environment, health, food access, education, social issues…
Perhaps I should have written “topics that come up in business” to be more obviously inclusive of the above. Anyway, these are a greater range of topics than literature or literary analysis.