Should I major in English?

juillet
Sun, 17 Feb 2019 13:04:57 +0000

I dunno, most jobs you could get with a degree in journalism you could also get with a degree in English.

Can you get a job with a degree in English? Of course. Might it be more difficult for you to get a job with a degree in English, especially as an international student? Depends on what you’re comparing it to. Right now, there’s more demand in the market for engineering, math/statistics, and computer science majors of course, but then of course not everyone can or wants to major in those (nor would we want them to, lest we have an overabundance of software developers and no one to manage the other parts of the tech sector, let alone all the other sectors). Most times, coming from a top 20 school is the more important factor in where and whether you get a job than your actual major itself.

Of course it is possible for media companies to sponsor employees for an H1-B visa. The real question is how likely that possibility is. As you mentioned, the landscape is unpredictable - and because of the extra work involved, often the sticking point is how much the company really wants you as an employee. I think it’d be…unusual for a company like The Washington Post or The New Yorker to hire a fresh college graduate as a full-time journalist right out of school…everyone wants to write for those kinds of publications, and they could fill their ranks with journalists with years of experience from other periodicals. But don’t let that discourage you, because there are HUNDREDS of publications in cities like New York and DC. The New York magazine and newspaper publishing industry alone is gigantic.

And of course there are other jobs you can do too, outside of being a journalist or writer.

I definitely wouldn’t plan to pursue a PhD in English literature as a ‘back-up’, unless you are really passionate about having a career as a scholar of English literature (and not as a journalist, writer, communications specialist, etc.)