[The Fall
2014 semester is coming to a close, and as usual I wanted to end the
semester with some reflections on my courses and other conversations, leading
up to a weekend post on some anticipations of spring (and not just the season;
although, yes). I’d love to hear some of your Fall 2014 reflections in
comments!]
On the best
answer I can think of to the question “What can you do with an English degree?”
I love teaching
our senior English
Studies Capstone course. I love the chance to read their senior portfolios,
in which the students pull together writing pieces, projects, and other work
across many different genres, types, stages, and skills; it gives me a chance
to get to know these graduating majors in a way I would never otherwise be able
to. I love having a space where we can just talk about some of the topics and
questions at the heart of our discipline: what writing is and why we do it; how
literature works and what it does to and for us; the challenges, frustrations,
and possibilities of education; and many more. Perhaps most of all, I love
teaching a course that embodies my student-driven
teaching philosophy so fully that I can’t even plan out many aspects of the
class until I’ve met this particular cohort and started to figure out what they
most need.
But this
semester, as we worked on another element to my version of Capstone—conversations
about and preparations for their next professional steps, including both career
options and graduate school possibilities—I realized that teaching Capstone
offers another unique pleasure: the chance to gain specific, detailed, evolving
evidence for just how many different futures one can pursue with an English
degree. In thinking about students from my prior Capstone sections (to share
their successes with my current students), I began to realize the breadth of
their current situations: from PhD candidates (in both the U.S. and the U.K.!) to
educators at every level; from those teaching in South Korea and Japan to those
running their own editing and freelance writing businesses; from published
novelists and poets to professional actors and screenwriters; from librarians
to specialists at museums and historic sites; among many other jobs and paths.
And in talking with the current students, I see just as many possible paths and
next steps for them.
I’m not trying
to deny the genuine and very troubling realities of the current job market, in
any and ever discipline and profession, and all the accompanying issues (student
loan debt, for example) that come with it. Nor am I suggesting that there
aren’t certain challenges that an English degree presents that would be less
present with one of FSU’s more overtly pre-professional majors (Nursing, for
example). But on the other hand, I do have four Capstone sections’ worth of
rebuttals to any doom-and-gloom perspectives on the futures available to
English majors, and I look forward to adding the students from this fifth
section to that growing body of evidence. And yeah, I can’t lie—when I see how
well-prepared these majors are for their next steps (professional, educational,
all of ‘em), I also kind of want to parphrase Jack Nicholson’s almost-concluding
line from As Good As It Gets: “it
makes me feel good, about me.”
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What stands
out from your semester or fall?
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