DO NOT STUDY ENGLISH AT UNI

Studying English at uni can lead to two major paths:
>Academic- become a professor yourself and attempt to change things from the inside
>Creative- get onto a good MFA program, network, if you put the work in your writing will increase and many give you a great shot at publication.

Otherwise, English can lead to careers in creative industries such as film and television, advertising or the TEFL route of you want to travel.

Can't help you if you are autistic. Hopefully you are at a good university studying alongside people with well connected parents who are going places. After you graduate, you need to have made friends with these people, got to know their parents and families. Then when you apply for a good job you have an inside contact to get your foot in the door. Or even better, when a vacancy comes up they remember their nephew's friend user who was at university with him etc etc
Better still is someone who starts a business straight out of university and you can get in on the ground level with all the share options and more that entail.

You've got to be absolutely fucking insane to bet your future on a industry so oversaturated with writers as film and television.

Since when is networking the purpose of attending university? Moreover, since when are employment prospects the purpose of attending university? Knowledge is not a means, but a goal, and universities should be, as they had been, bastions of learning, intellectual and spiritual development, but in the contemporary state of affairs the once noble institution has been reduced to "networking" and "cashing in your degree".

Why do americans never stop making wide-ranging criticisms of fields that are only shit in american universities?

University was never noble you fucking nonce, it was always a popularity contest, professors were paid depending on how many students attended their classes.

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Probably because they, alongside Britain are the only countries with universities of importance.

>Since when is networking the purpose of attending university? Moreover, since when are employment prospects the purpose of attending university? Knowledge is not a means, but a goal, and universities should be, as they had been, bastions of learning, intellectual and spiritual development, but in the contemporary state of affairs the once noble institution has been reduced to "networking" and "cashing in your degree".

I agree that Universities should be about knowledge and spiritual development, but right now they are either:
- about teaching you and giving you connections to make money
- (this is mostly in the US) a place where you have hedonistic fun while you are a young adult by partying and watching college sports

>Since when is networking the purpose of attending university?
Since everyone and their mom has a degree

Because europoors arent relevant
This is true for most departments

The irony of theses posts being next to each other is delicious considering continental universities are so preoccupied with students gaining meaningful employment they completely neglect post-graduate research.

I'm not him, but university education was supposed to be about knowledge and liberating your mind.

wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/spring-2011-the-city-bounces-back-four-portraits/classical-education-in-america/

Here's a hot take: studying English helped me become a qualitatively better writer than if I hadn't studied it. My uni had a strictly criticism-focused major, and we were trained to write academic papers. This not only forced me to study the classics in-depth and with guidance, but gave me a critical eye toward complexities in my own work. I also took academic classes with my workshop leaders, good writers in themselves, who then wrote me excellent recs. Now I'm at a fully-funded MFA.

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>My uni had a strictly criticism-focused major,
Sure, but this isn't the norm.

Wrong. I like technical writing, being a writing coach and tutoring and the degree combined with my experience in those fields will help with that.
I didn't focus on literature because you can learn anything in that focus by fucking reading, and I made contacts, so I think I'll be okay.

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it may not be the norm but it's what OP is railing at

I like how this guys talks about the founding fathers without once mentioning that they would be horrified at the governments involvement.

Cicero is rolling in his grave.

Think it’s a great post
My hobby is studying grammar
Grammar as deep as a Peruvian mine
Once I’m done, I’ll go back to reading lit

OP here, I'm studying in Australia. Can't imagine how much worse it is over there.

>can't imagine how much worse it is over there
Based on your post, it isn't
t. americunt

Redpill me on the average American English student experience

There are women and minorities everywhere, and they are allowed to speak, even in class. Worse, none of the women will have sex with white guys (they consider it 'oppressive') so they all either fuck niggers or become dykes. Most professors aren't even right wing, all believe in the holohoax. It's dystopian.

any britbros who took/ are taking english, how is it?

How do you find class discussions? This is actually the one aspect of my English courses I enjoy, just shooting the shit and probing a text without having to worry about seeming overly intellectual - though this is something you could do just as well with close friends at a bar over a pint

Speaking for myself at a Forbes top-10, if you dedicate time (hours) to studying and thinking, you will do fine in class. Class discussions are as lively and informed as can be for 20-year-olds. English major, phil minor; English was was for the cool kids who dressed nice, phil was the nerds, history was for nerds who couldn't crack into phil. STEM was full of socially awkward but extremely hard-working students. Partying is for pseuds. Legitimately not lying to you, I don't know a single person who partied and ended up in grad school. Maybe they need a few more years to get their shit together.
ignore obvious baitposter and resenter

I really want to do English grad school. Right now I am majoring in Business (IU Bloomington) with just enough slots in my four years to also get an English BA. Parents won't let me drop the business degree.
Is not giving my full attention to humanities gonna already disqualify me from top grad schools? US News ranks Bloomington 20 in English, does that help or hurt my odds?

does the same go for other languages? I live in Germany and I'm wondering if the same would apply to german studies

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>everywhere, and they are allowed to speak, even in class. Worse, none of the women will have sex with white guys (they consider it 'oppressive') so they all either fuck niggers or become dykes.
Just because you're white and didn't get laid (or into college), doesn't mean white people don't get any. If anything women want to plant their flags in people. There are hypocrisies but you've failed to find them.

It probably has less to do with the language and more to do with having a better public education system than burgers, which germany does.

>this is what libtards actually think

My degree isn’t English, but I took an English course. It was fun, but a bit basic. We did the English Romantics, Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Austen and the Brontes. We also did more contemporary writers like Orwell and Seamus Heaney. The teachers were nice and knowledgeable and the students were just ordinary people. Still, I’m glad I didn’t make it my full degree because the scope of study was limited and I found the class fairly easy.

This is also not going to be a common experience, but some of our token “diversity” texts were unorthodox. I am not joking when I say this, but we actually studied manga as part of the course.

Go to office hours and nerd out with your professor. (I'm an engineer)

this is what OP is railing against you double nigger

How would you do it in a filed like ANE for example?

>if you want to be a writer, then just fucking do it, send it to the new yorker, and cross your fingers
actually that's terrible advice. the chances of the new yorker picking up an unknown from the slush pile is virtually 0%. writing isn't some fantasy game where talent magically skips to the top. you still have to play by the rules, which include building a portfolio and/or a reputation. there's a lot more networking than you think, and when i say that i mean networking as one of the judgments of quality. If you've worked with X, and X is respected, you're in the door.

Rec some guidebooks so us poorfags can do an MFA at home, fren.

These are some books that have been helpful to me, in no particular order.

Pound, ABC of Reading
Baxter, The Art of Subtext
Lopate, Art of the Personal Essay
Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry

also this:
archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html?

if you haven't already, read Carmen Machado, Denis Johnson, Stuart Dybek, and Justin Phillip Reed.

>archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html?
I'm impressed with it. Thanks for the list, I'll work through it.

DO NOT STUDY I REPEAT

it's all fuckin pointless in the end isn't it? you can only pray to be intelligent enough to be able to get the piece of paper whilst also doing all the other stuff in your free time.
Seriously, the adult world is all about who can bang their head against a wall the longest and most efficient. You have to work and work to gain a slight edge over others, just so you can get a job where you can bang your head against another wall for the remainder of ur days.
Reality is so depressing, some people just have no idea. The only thing you can do is to try and trick yourself into having an emotional response to the things that happen around you. That's the only way to make anything feel meaningful, and it's what everyone is essentially after at the end of the day.
You gotta realize these "creative fields" you speak of all come down to basically the same thing, they just employ a slightly different strategy to attain it. Creativity/aesthetics will soon be completely quantifiable and artificially reproducible. Poets and artists are already being ranked through online portfolios, like/dislike ratios etc.
Get yourself a decently paying job you can hopefully easily keep up with, and just drug yourself emotionally in your free time using whatever means possible.
It's all shit, you have to delude yourself into thinking it's not.

Going to study Phil or Eng at a uni near me this fall after waiting to get accepted for over a year. I expect to switch a few times but not really leave the liberal arts domain. My only regret as it is now is waiting a year instead of settling for a comfy state uni.

Don't do Eng. If you're set on Phil, pair it with a social sciences minor.

Yea, I'm definitely interested in Psych/Economics/Linguistics but the thing is i'm pretty sure my strength lies in writing but I haven't delved too much in philosophy myself.

All in all I know 4 languages already and if I learn a high in-demand language like, for example Turkish, I can live comfortable life and write in my free time.

This, currently PoliSci/Phil along with half the fucking philosophy department. It’s pretty much the best route for liberal arts.

Nah, it’s not that bad. I double majored in English and philosophy and studied under some phenomenal professors, wouldn’t be the same person without it. However, I think a lot of people fuck it up. I made sure to study under professors who were, for the most part, published in an author or field I was interested in. Further, I made sure to read some of their work beforehand, especially if it pertained to what I wanted to research.

Made some great contacts this way. Undergraduate is what you make of it.

I recommend phil. But take classes in everything that interests you. You've got 4 years and the first year should be about exploration.

Relax

W E A L L K N O W

Imagine getting assblasted on your first big paper and then writing this

faggot

Not calling bullshit on this, but I think subtly people know this and this leads to the abundance of mental illness we have.

Germany, Japan, France, China, hell even something shitty like Russia is relevant in certain fields.

The problem isn't even the ideology. The problem is that the ideology itself is a semi-conscious way of rent seeking. You have to be retarded and/or malicious to arrive at 'we need to have safe spaces' if your starting point is Marx. If only the lefties dropped this kayfabe activism, we could perhaps pursue some common goals, but alas it seems like signalling > reality to both sides.

You're the idiot if you think safe spaces result from Marx. That's your strawman. These are concurrent phenomena that are not conceptually related.

Because when we Americans take a pinch of snuff, Europe sneezes.

This.
I didn't major in English, but all of the hardest markers, some of them self-professed (no other departments' profs ever said this, even if they were tough), have always been English profs. What's their problem?

that's because English profs are the only ones who care about defeating grade inflation. also they hate mental laziness and most kids who come in for their required english classes are exactly that

at my english degree they have agendas but we are in no requirement to push them and they often encourage us to disagree and debate

seems this whole SJW thing is a product of anti-Western values bundled up in that confused culture of anti-imperialism but supporting American hegemony culturally that is so latent in American exceptionalism

p.s. I have discovered so many new poets and authors at uni I otherwise would not have engaged with e.g. Donne, Coetzee, Sidney, Pullman, Carlos Williams etc.

Thank you for reminding me why I didn't go to college

>also they hate mental laziness and most kids who come in for their required english classes are exactly that
Shiet I did my bachelor's in English and 90% of my batchmates were like this.

yeah, that's the problem dipshit

I feel you, I came to despise academia during my undergrad phil years. Doing my MDiv to be a pastor and not looking back.

I've read 4 of those and donne is the only one worth reading

there is no justification for illiteracy

embarrassing opinion

you are the real embarrassment for confusing lateral movement with progression

>university is for networking
No it's not, it is for nothing.