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If you love your English classes, if reading and writing are the activities that make you feel most alive, then you should take this seriously and not be daunted by people who claim there is no practical use for these skills. The key to getting jobs with an English degree is experience, either in an internship or a job and/or using even writing and editing that you do on your own.

Any business needs people who can think analytically and deeply and creatively about anything from marketing plans, to advertising, to communication.

However, the truth is that in a capitalist economic structure, your analysis and creativity can only support you if someone buys' what you produce. In a dark sense, a lot of it comes down to selling something to a customer. So, if you learn to think creatively and insightfully in your English classes, you will be able to apply these things to a job that is maybe more suited to you than, say, social work or plumbing. But at the same time, there will be restrictions of your thought and what you produce.

In my experience, true engagement with life and continual questioning and exploring are sort of at odds with any 9-5 job. The best thing for a free spirit and an expansive mind is either to continue on to higher education, or to hone a craft so well that you can do it at your leisure and spend the rest of your time exploring life as meaningfully as possible. This is the only way I've found I can live authentically. It is asking a lot, though, and for many years I have edited, wrote, taught, published, and just kept hacking away at what was mine and what wasn't. As a novelist and a person who needs lots of time to myself to explore thought, I have found that freelancing through a talent agency works well, allowing for hiatuses between assignments.

Below I list only 10 types of work that being an English major can prepare you for and that can be challenging and fulfilling for an English major. I don't want it to seem like the options listed below are going to be utopias for everyone who loves Proust. One of them might be for you, though. We all have our own calling. The key is going to be continuing to listen to yourself and use your engagement with art and with insight to look into your own truest self. Can you read yourself like a short story, finding the themes that recreate themselves, the lyrical passages that move you the most?

You can't make decisions out of fear. You have to imagine the best life possible and follow that thread.

I'm going

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