Human.exe Has Started Working on a lot of Papers

April 2021

I’ve got a whole degree in English — name on it and everything — that took me three and a half years and about nineteen thousand dollars in debt. That entire time, my dad asked, “Why English?” I started out double majoring in English and Industrial Engineering and if I was going to drop anything, he hoped it would be the English. Every summer we had the same conversation: what jobs can I do with an English degree that will pay the bills?

Well, it’s not about the bills. It’s four-ish years of my life — I didn’t want to spend that time and money stressing out over some level of calculus that I knew I hated and didn’t want to do afterward. English is incredibly versatile compared to a STEM degree and I’ll fight on that hill. What can I do with an English degree? Anything I set my mind to because I have the skills to critically read and understand any text and the capacity to learn any subject and write an in-depth paper on it.

Studying texts is to study humanity; it’s the key to the inner workings of minds. Texts and their meaning are how millions of people are entertained by texts — I dare say if we change the meaning of texts to mean anything on a medium (books, audiobooks, movies, even art on some level), we could list every person in the world to some degree. We’re looking into the intricacies of the mind, looking at how the author experiences the world.

I am autistic and struggled with understanding people a lot in high school. I hated English classes until tenth grade when it became less about memorizing stems and started looking into books themselves. Why English? Because how else am I supposed to learn? My minor was in psychology, and I one-hundred percent believe that I am a better person for choosing that education path.

Why English? Because how else am I to learn how to be human?