Where has the English Major Taken You?

Peg Willingham (CLAS 1985)
When I decided to major in English at UVa in the early 1980s, my skeptical parents encouraged me to take a computer class “to fall back on.”  This was the “greed is good” era, when many of my Comm School friends were preparing for successful careers on Wall Street, and my parents worried that I would end up living at home, reading novels after working the night shift at Bob’s Big Boy restaurant. (Don’t laugh — that’s where I toiled on the weekends in high school.)

I did try a computer class — but withdrew after getting an F on the first test, along with a desperate note from the professor (“Please see me at once — you have no grasp of this at all.”) I cravenly withdrew from the class instead, and eventually convinced my parents that a degree in English from U.Va. would serve me well in the long run — and it has. 

During my fourth year at U.Va., I wavered between two very different career choices: pursuing a PhD in English, or working overseas as a diplomat. I took the Foreign Service exam that December, but wound up on the waiting list, and accepted the University of Michigan’s offer of a fellowship. A few months after getting my MA there, still some years away from completing a dissertation, I got a call from the State Department. I was finally off the waiting list, and had to show up in Washington two weeks later for training. I had enjoyed teaching, made wonderful friends in my PhD program, and, as a member of the graduate students’ union, relished the thrill of almost going on strike for better tuition reimbursement. (The university caved after the Teamsters took our side. Solidarity forever!) However, literary theory baffled me, and I quailed at the idea of writing a book-length thesis on a topic that hadn’t already been explored by some other scholar. So, in April 1987, I bid Ann Arbor and academia farewell.

Most people in my Foreign Service orientation class seemed to have majored in foreign affairs, and I felt intimidated at first.  But the lessons learned as an English major at U.Va. — knowing how to read, write, and THINK —were critical in that career and beyond. Dissecting symbolism, archetypes and themes in literature and analyzing fictional characters really does prepare you for jobs that require the ability to read people and to extract key messages from hours of blather or stacks of documents. I have also spent the last twenty years telling stories for a living, and I have really enjoyed it.

As a political officer, I worked as a de facto in-house journalist for the U.S. government, writing reports on events in the countries where I served (Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia, and Colombia). Writing well is highly valued in the State Department, and a $5,000 prize is awarded each year to the best reporting officer. I was able to put my English degree to work in other ways, such as successfully rewriting the embassy’s request for danger pay in Colombia, which had been denied, or serving on the advisory committee for a Costa Rican friend defending her master’s degree thesis in English literature. (Over the years, I was humbled to meet talented students seeking literature degrees, for whom English was not a first language — including PhD candidate from Benin who wrote beautifully in English, his fourth language.)

After leaving the Foreign Service in 2000, I became a lobbyist, first for the pharmaceutical industry’s trade association, and then for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (www.iavi.org), a job that I love. Lobbying is a much maligned profession, yet its practitioners assert that we are merely exercising our First Amendment right to petition our government. We are also storytellers, trying to capture the imagination of our audience. Good lobbyists are information brokers, often seeking to make complicated issues (like intellectual property rights or immunology or the different subtypes of HIV) understandable in just a few “talking points.” As an advocate trying to communicate with busy Congressional staffers, I have to write and speak succinctly and persuasively, making every word count. In my free time, I volunteer for political campaigns, using those same skills to write materials targeting at undecided voters.

English majors are versatile, interesting, and broad-minded. We defy the convention wisdom that majoring in English spells career suicide. I feel lucky that I got to study what I wanted to and still have a rewarding professional life.

Rebecca Jesada (CLAS 2003)
In law school, being a former English major is a blessing and a curse (a cliché you can use there without getting dirty looks from the literary high-minded)!  I call it the “you-must-have-been-an-English-major” grimace. It appeared when my 1L writing professor read the first legal memo I had ever written (or read, for that matter). A smug and knowing look immediately came into his eyes. I waited — confident yet appropriately humble smile ready —  for him to tell me it was the best written work by a law student he had read in his thirty-year career. Instead I heard: “I was an English major once, too.” The paper was so bloody with red ink that we decided to start the discussion with sections that needed no re-writing. The meeting lasted two minutes.

The next week there was a seminar discussion of Hemingway’s short story Shooting an Elephant. No one had read anything else by Hemingway, and I received a blank stare when I raised the topic of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. I went home, called my best friend (also a U.Va. English major), and asked her if she thought law school was really the right place for me.

Countless weeks later and exactly 16 pages and 2 lines lighter, I received an A- for the course, and I knew there could be no place more suited for me than law school. I like to refer to that first legal writing experience as “the odyssey.” My classmates insist on calling it a “paper.” Where’s their flair? Does this lack of creativity explain why I was the only one to ask: what’s wrong with using words like myriad and quotidian in a legal brief? By the time I could laugh about it, I knew my professor had been right when he told me that one day, in some far-away, future lawyerly existence, my dark and secret past as an English major would return to being a great strength. He told me I had to learn to crawl before I could walk, and to walk before I could do so with my own rhythm and style. I resigned myself to learning to write with a whole new alphabet.

Ultimately, the training I received at U.Va. has created a solid foundation for my career ever since graduation. In the four years I have been working in Department of Defense contracting, I have received many compliments for my writing skills, countless requests for help with writing projects, and four employment reviews citing my writing skills as a major contributor to a contract’s success or the reason I was able to earn a client’s respect. In law school, however, I have had to learn to use my writing know-how in an entirely different way, forcing myself to use five words where ten could make the same point with much more pizzazz and my own personal touch. I have been working predominantly with doctors, nurses, chemists and engineers since college, so I am used to all the English major jokes and long past the strange feeling I got on my first day, when I realized mine was the only office without math and chemistry text books falling off the shelves. Being an English major did not provide me with a roadmap to start a particular profession the day after graduation, but it gave me much more than that: the critical reading, analytical, and writing skills that I have put to use in so many different ways over the years. I am constantly re-inventing the ways that these tools not only come in handy and make me successful at what I do, but also enrich my personal growth and life-long love of literature. English may not be the right major for someone who wants an obvious and pre-determined path forward, but combined with subsequent professional training, or another major or minor (mine was Bioethics, which has played the guiding hand in my career path), I believe it has the potential to be the best decision you will ever make!