Ask Dr. Ross

What's It Like to Be An English Major? Inside the College of Arts and Sciences Part 1

• Catherine Ross • Season 3 • Episode 6

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Maybe we think we know what a day in the life of an English major looks like: classic novels, writing, poetry, writing, presentations, and (you guessed it!) writing.  But what do English majors actually learn?  Where do they fit in the world outside of universities?

The variety of answers may surprise you.

This week, Dr. Ross and student producer Ashley Worley launch their new series highlighting inside stories and college prep practicalities from UT Tyler's English department.  Department chair Dr. Ann Beebe and English student Jim Clayton join the discussion to share what's really happening in English classes.  If you're choosing your degree, preparing for college life, or just curious about other experiences in higher ed, this series is for you.

Have more questions about life inside an English department?  Email us at ADRquestions@gmail.com or leave a comment below.  We'd love to hear from you!

Want to learn more or connect with UT Tyler's Department of Literature and Languages?  Click the links below!

Speaker 1:

So, as you all have probably figured out, one of the goals of this podcast is to educate folks about what goes on at universities, and the central college in most universities was the College of Arts and Sciences.

Speaker 2:

For this series, we're going to be introducing each of our wonderful departments in the College of Arts and Sciences by bringing you a top professor in that department and one of the top students as well. We hope that this is very helpful to you as you're choosing your major or just wanting to learn more about what to expect from college life in general.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoy. So here we are in the Ask Dr Ross podcast. Today, our guests are Dr Ann Beebe, who is the chair of the Department of Literature and Languages, and our soon-to-be college graduate, jim Clayton, who is an English major. But I'd like each of you to tell us a little bit about yourselves.

Speaker 3:

So we'll start with you, dr Beebe the current chair of the Department of Literature and Languages. I've been here 24, going on 25 years. I am an early Americanist, which means I teach literature pre-1870. I have a book out on Emily Dickinson and my Anne Bradstreet book should be coming out this year. I have been lucky enough to serve in many different roles, including the Presidential Fellows Faculty Advisor.

Speaker 1:

Now, Jim, tell us about yourself.

Speaker 4:

First off, I'm a 54-year-old undergrad senior. My career previously was in the oil and gas industry. I was a safety trainer overseas in the Middle East. Then COVID happened and you know, middle age is a little difficult thing to go through when you're dealing with the oil and gas industry. So rather than stay in that, I decided to go back to school and do what I really wanted to do in the first place.

Speaker 1:

So the big question is why? From oil and gas to literature and languages?

Speaker 4:

Well, literature and languages and writing was never far from what I did. I was the one guy on the oil well site that was walking around with, you know, a copy of Count of Monte Cristo or something like that, and someone was always asking me why I'm so weird. But for me you're doing a transitional career. You've gone from something very manual, labor intensive. You're looking for a foundational career, something that you build on, and today's society tends to kind of look at English as a bunch of these and thousand prose and poetry, and I don't have time for that. I want to go and do all these other great things, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what your discipline is going to be. You're going to be faced with a moment where you have to communicate that discipline to somebody who doesn't speak your technical language. If you don't have the ability to communicate, write and speak, you're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 1:

Or to read critically and carefully.

Speaker 3:

What Jim is saying. We focus on skills, not necessarily preparing for one single career. So we're focused on critical thinking skills, analysis skills which will be valuable in your future career on time management skills, on creativity, on emotional intelligence. We focus on the skills that then can translate and transfer into thousands of careers, not just one career, and then you're stuck there, potentially for 30 years.

Speaker 1:

Right, potentially for 30 years Right. There are a whole lot of really famous people who you don't know about, who are English majors, but also there's about 40 different fields where the English major really does prepare you for that, and more and more we're looking to make sure we point our students in that direction. What do you do as an English professor? What is your job?

Speaker 3:

I suppose the easiest way to structure that answer is to think about what they call faculty workload allocation. And so for someone who's a professor, your job is allocated a certain percent teaching, research and service. And so someone who's tenure track, approximately 60% of their time in a year should be devoted to teaching courses.

Speaker 1:

Tell us a little bit about what an English class is like in Dr Ann Beebe's classes.

Speaker 3:

I can speak to literature because that's what I teach. Now you determine the topic right. What do you want to teach? How are you going to structure that course? You set the table is how I like to think about it. And here's the meal that's being provided. It's a meal that lasts an entire semester and these are the texts we're going to read. And here's how they build, here's how they speak to each other. There are thousands of books and texts I can choose from. Which ones want to have a conversation at this moment? Which ones do I think for students right now are really going to resonate? So I set the table and then, for the most part, classes are discussion. I do what's called guided discussion, where I bring in a series of questions. You know I'm not a sporty person, but it's sort of like a tennis metaphor. Just okay, here's a soft lob over the net. Who wants it? Who wants it? Jim, you take this one, and so we just start talking, start playing and having those discussions.

Speaker 1:

So, jim, this is your opportunity. What's it like to return one of the softballs from Dr Beebe's tennis game?

Speaker 4:

Honestly, it's one of my favorite things about coming back to school.

Speaker 4:

Being able to communicate with someone you know from a literary standpoint and realize that I'm not the biggest fish in the pond at that point is really good, because I'm a big proponent of if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. So anytime I go into a classroom environment I'm looking to be challenged by my professor. The way you present your curriculum. I don't want to say that it forces a student to consider things outside their wheelhouse, but you almost have to. If you don't, usually you miss the whole point of the exercise. And most of my analytical skills began in one or two classes. It was Dr Beebe's class and it was Dr Strong's class and then later Dr Strong's class and then later Dr Kelly's class, because they're all analysis based and that's the big push for an English degree is that it teaches you how to look at text, how to consider media and then analyze the deeper meanings behind that stuff. That's a skill set that most students come into college not having Ask questions and draw connections see patterns.

Speaker 4:

Yes, always ask questions. Never fail to ask a question, even if you think it's a dumb question.

Speaker 3:

There truly is no dumb question other than you know what's my name, but part of what we do is just also teaching students to think about how they ask the right question in order to elicit the ideas and generate the discussion that they want. Our department has three very distinct and strong elements Well, four, actually. We have foreign languages. On the English side, we have a really strong ret comp faculty, and many of them also specialize in digital writing and digital storytelling and digital analysis. We have a really strong and Jim can speak to this as well creative writing faculty members in classes, and then we have classes that are textual analysis-based, that are literature-based. It's not book club, please, please, please. It's not glorified book club. It's looking at texts and analyzing texts, the context around them, the historical, biographical and so forth context, and asking questions about how and why is an author making these decisions?

Speaker 1:

So tell me, Jim, what is the work that you've most enjoyed.

Speaker 4:

Right now I'm taking a class with Dr Jessup in Modernism, where we're reading Hemingway and Stein and TS Eliot, and when you're putting it in perspectives of why that movement happened, then it changes the whole timbre of what you're reading. You're looking at, you know, a movement that was brought on by the Industrial Revolution and the uncertainty of what was going on at that time. Well then you take that and you look at what we're going through right now with AI and the digital revolution and realize that it's same same Now. It is every bit as relevant in this moment as it was a hundred odd years ago. So that then becomes why this is important, because it applies back into the history of who we are.

Speaker 1:

You know, I too teach English. I teach the Victorian period and the Romantic period, and when students just try to read things cold, oftentimes they miss so much, and so that's our job, isn't it, Dr Beebe?

Speaker 3:

the layers and the context and not just give it to them. I don't lecture, I do guided discussions and I have a checklist of things that I want to draw out of them. I want them to come to that because you remember in class what you contribute or what the person sitting next to you contributed. You zone out after three minutes in terms of the professors telling you everything. It's all about the discussion and learning how to communicate and contribute ideas in a group with real people, training students how to discover those ideas, make an argument and put it in writing.

Speaker 1:

Maybe you could explain to folks what is digital writing.

Speaker 3:

Digital writing focuses on different genres texts that might be connected to websites or connected to different social media campaigns, or visual text, memes and and gifs or gifs you guys can argue about that later or webtoons or blogs all forms of writing that are transmitted primarily digitally. The digital storytelling minor focuses more on the integration of all those kinds of writing and how they are dependent upon narrative and storytelling. We have an article from a graduate I want to say 10 years ago do you remember? Megan Reyes Works in philanthropy.

Speaker 3:

Philanthropy is for English majors because it's all about storytelling, learning how to tell stories, connecting the people who have money and want to understand how that money is going to be used, and you do that by sharing the stories of people who have benefited from previous donations. That's all storytelling. That's an English major job right there who are doing jobs in hundreds of different careers. That is one where I wish more English majors and just people in general and parents talking to their kids would recognize the value of learning how to communicate and tell stories and make connections and if that's what you want your student to do, push them towards English. It is the most practical major out there, looking ahead to the 21st century.

Speaker 1:

It is the most practical major out there looking ahead to the 21st century. Ashley, you have been involved in communication.

Speaker 3:

But she's also writing the technology minor right.

Speaker 2:

Digital storytelling and interactive design. I just switched over to it, so I'm very, very new to all of this. I was previously a graphic design minor, which I really enjoyed, but one of the main reasons I switched when I heard that this was available is because my interests were always. They seemed across the board, but I found out what the commonality was was the storytelling aspect, what they were trying to say. Really, they look different, but they're all just these various different mediums, these expressions of a story. You know, a story is universal. Everybody understands it, and that's what I really loved is what I found out.

Speaker 1:

And so these are things that the English department has started to expand into because our culture has changed. You know, literature is not just the old dead guys Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, or even Wordsworth or Thoreau, it's the new guys. I think it's important for people to understand that the study of English is a much broader field now and really very relevant to all the changes in the modern world today.

Speaker 3:

It comes down to communication through whatever means, cave paintings or writing in the sand. The mediums change the desire for human beings to communicate and tell stories and share connections. That doesn't change. That's the heart of what we do in the Department of Literature and Languages with foreign languages, digital writing, creative writing and textual analysis.

Speaker 1:

And every new novel or poem they read, they get a chance to experience some other human beings walk in this life and to imagine how they might have responded to that. Right now, when you think about the job of being an English student now you're finishing up what are some of the best advice you can give to any students, but maybe specifically from the standpoint of having been an English student?

Speaker 4:

Well, when you first get here, brace yourself because it's not high school anymore. The responsibility is yours now, and in that that's where I think a lot of students tend to fail is that they expect the high school mentality of you know, if you read this and you recite that exactly, then you're going to get the A. That's not the case, because that's not the point. The point is to read something, inform your own opinions and your own understanding and your own analysis about that. That's the point. So once you get that understood, then it is about engagement. It's about going beyond just what you get in the classroom. Make friends with other people, make friends with your professors. Your professors are there to help you and I've not met a single professor who is not open door policy, ready to help you out at the drop of a hat.

Speaker 4:

Engage in other clubs, other organizations, things of this nature, the writing center, volunteer the digital aspects of it Go do that stuff of it. Go do that stuff. Having that mentality as a student preps you for the world that you're going to step into when you're no longer a student. It's a dog-eat-dog world. If you're going and you're competing for a job with somebody, your job skill set is critical. If you have the ability to critically analyze text and then communicate that to somebody else, and the person next to you has the same skill set of being a doctor or being an accountant or being whatever, doesn't have that ability to communicate, then you're leaps and bounds above that person. It's one of the arguments that I make for making English if not your major, then at least consider it as a minor.

Speaker 3:

I swear I didn't pay him to say this.

Speaker 4:

No, well, no, this is this is you know big, burly oil field guy coming in from the real world and telling you that out there hurts. You need to have some skill sets that are going to prep you for that, and the last thing you want to be is what I was in my late 40s swinging a hammer and iron. You still have to have the social sciences. You still have to have the humanities. It gives us our base. It gives us our foundation. Without that, we have nothing to build on.

Speaker 3:

Foundation for other majors and, in many cases, the best foundation for careers, because, again, it's the skills that you're talking about that can be, and need to be, transferred to all these different careers, because the job that we are hiring for right now is going to be different in two years, is going to be unrecognizable in 10 years.

Speaker 3:

The career itself may be gone in 20 years, and so focusing on the skills that make you overall employable in many different careers is, just as you say, a more practical, a more flexible approach to getting a college degree and getting that foundation that will make you secure that, no matter how the economy changes, no matter what you want to do professionally, you have the skills to succeed. It's a wonderful enlivening environment, but this is a semi-professional environment. In some ways it's just healthier to start to treat it like a professional environment and start to treat fellow students as colleagues and start networking and start networking and professors are not their bosses but they are authority figures and so to start to navigate how you're going to present yourself professionally. And you've got, throughout your college career, many different opportunities. You know 120 credits is the baseline for a degree in the state of Texas, so you have many different opportunities to start building your professional brand.

Speaker 1:

Well, and again, again, the students come back with English degrees and they go out and they do so many different things and they say everything I learned in English I use in some other way. I've got nursing students who, I mean, they went on to be nurses but they were English minors or majors. And one student recently told me I am better than most of my colleagues because I notice things. I learned how to look carefully and to read people. So it's a wonderful set of skills, dr, and at those I'm trying to talk with incoming students, who are sometimes undecided and trying to persuade them.

Speaker 3:

Here is why you need to minor. In one of our programs we have the English minor. The number one complaint employers often have is that they're getting students who don't have the communication skills, the writing skills, that they need on day one. So you become a double threat. Have your wonderful degree in biology, minor in English and you become someone that from day one is wait a minute, we need to hire that person.

Speaker 3:

My biggest challenge, representing the department at those orientations and fairs is making clear, not just to the student but to their parents. There are so many wonderful movies set on college campuses with English professors or have you know images of English classroom, but those are movies. That is fiction, and sometimes they don't quite understand. That's not what we do. You should not say to your student no, you can't major in English or minor in English, because it'll just be some version of Animal House and you're going to be a Starbucks barista for the rest of your life. All for baristas. It's a wonderful skill and if that's what you want to do, great. But I have yet to meet one of our alumni and I keep up with him on LinkedIn and on various social medias who now is a full-time barista.

Speaker 3:

They've moved on to all these wonderful careers that we didn't even imagine. There was no way we knew 40 years ago about AI right. We don't know what's going to be happening in the marketplace coming up. Focus on the skills and make yourself adaptable and build that foundation so that you can transition from career to career, success to success.

Speaker 1:

We deal in stereotypes so often in fields, and those stereotypes are just not really real. Just ask doctors and lawyers what they think about the way doctors and lawyers are portrayed in film and television. Today, too, we really don't have good ideas of what's going on. That's why we wanted to launch this series is we want folks to know what really goes on in the English department, and later on we're going to talk about the communications department and history department and others as well. We are so grateful that you all were willing to spend so much time with us. We've got the link to your newsletter and we've got your picture, and if anybody ever wants to ask you questions, they will send me the questions and we'll send them off to you and we will tell more of the story of English major you.

People on this episode

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Catherine Ross

Host
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Ashley Worley

Co-host