According to a recent survey, over half of undergraduate English majors still go into teaching, a profession expected to need hundreds of thousands more recruits in the coming years. But exceptions prove the rule, and there are lots of exceptions. English majors think in terms of skills and abilities, not job titles, and among the principal processes of our discipline, you will develop above all your expertise in language.

The Power of Narrative | Cashing In on Imagination | How to Prepare for Jobs That Don't Exist Yet
Career Tracks in English and Beyond

We prefer a writer who knows something about science to a scientist who knows something about writing.

– job listing in The Economist

If, as some say, the perceptions and reflections of the human mind are shaped by language, especially by narrative, you see that along with your diploma you will hold in your hands an instrument of unprecedented power! From the ancient Greek rhapsodes singing Homer, to the most modern singer, screenwriter, or political speechmaker — the public sphere revolves to the music of words. Even scientists and engineers need to translate their work into text in order to move it from the laboratory into the wider world.

How can a course in the Victorian novel improve your chances to make a good living after graduation? Will clear and concise writing, critical reading, and research skills still be in demand in this new century? Ask an attorney, needing to summarize a pile of case law that dwarfs Dickens’s bibliography. Does literary criticism work in the "real world"? Ask a vice-president for purchasing, whose job requires her to look for loopholes and ambiguities in thousands of pages of contracts every week. They all work with language and need to be sensitive to its nuances, multiple meanings and historical contexts. At least Dickens provides a plot!

Simply put, the abilities you’ll gather in critical reading, writing across genres and disciplines, research on- and off-line, small-group teamwork and oral presentation can ensure your flexibility in as-yet unimagined jobs, markets and careers. In 1995 several alumni surveys at major U.S. universities showed that at least 75% of their graduates were working at jobs that hadn’t existed when they were in college.

But wait . . . having read this far, do you think people study language, literature, rhetoric and composition just to make money? Of course they do, but there are other important reasons. Literary studies can open up for you the imaginative traditions of a thousand years of poetry, drama and prose — the record of human beings striving to understand one another and their environment.

PC Magazine Associate Editor Jennifer Zanio, an English major, wrote her senior thesis on Edith Wharton, who taught her about "civilized survival in the face of unrelenting natural forces."

Your own appreciation and understanding of life can be deepened by literature’s wild characters, unexpected adventures, intense meditations and reflections, moral and emotional epiphanies, lyrical shouts of sorrow, joy and anguish. Linguistic and rhetorical studies can make you more conscious of the ways language shapes society and the individual, for good or ill. They can even make you one of the shapers.