ATTENTION all english majors are needed! [Archive]

ryan9112

01-12-2015, 05:26 AM

i have a few questions. first i want to tell you why i am asking u these questions. i am in my senior year and i always loved writing hell that is the only thing i am good at. so when i told my parets i wanted to be an eng major they laughed at me asking me if i wanted to spend my life teaching in some school barely getting paid. so now my future is predetermined by my parents which is shipping me off to germany to become a boring mechanical engineer. i also thought long and hard about it. do i have to major in eng to become a writer? i mean u cant really teach someone to be a "good writer" u can only teach him the basics like paragraph builds grammar and what have u. sorry i forgot to ask my questions coherently.
1) does not majoring in eng badly effects my writing?
2)do eng majors make money [serious]
3)if my eng is good and i have a certain way in writing you know like amazing word play and creativity can i make a living if i became a writer
4) this is quite embarrassing: what do writers write about. can it be anything? like magazine articles books etc?
5)are you guys happy with ur choices in life in this case majoring in eng?
thank you in advance and sorry for my grammar.

Pompey Bum

01-12-2015, 02:01 PM

so now my future is predetermined by my parents which is shipping me off to germany to become a boring mechanical engineer.

To give you a perspective that you may not want to hear (no one ever does), becoming a "boring mechanical engineer" does not mean that you have to stop writing. Even if you have to put it on hold while you are studying, that doesn't mean that you cannot return to your first love in a few years; or even see her behind your career's back (to extend my metaphor ad absurdem). After all, literary talent cannot be taught, and the principle of delaying pleasure is one that every intellectual learns eventually.

And your parents are perfectly correct, as hard as that may be to hear. The contextual reality of being a student does not last long after graduation. It melts like ice cream in the sun. And it will not take long for you to learn (perhaps the hard way) that the quality of life you enjoy will depend to a large extent on the degree of independence you can assert from those who seek to chain you to a treadmill to make money for them. And I'm very sorry to tell you--I didn't make it up--that your ability to assert that independence will depend almost entirely on how far out of debt you are. In other words how much you have put away.

Perhaps my brother elder, Manichaean, (who was playfully teasing you, by the way: he's a joker like I am, because we can afford to be) can offer his perspective as well. But for me, I managed to retire before my contemporaries, some of whom learned in 2008-2009 that they would be working even longer than expected, because I took care of my money from the time I was your age. It wan't because I had read Dostoyevsky, as important as that has been to who I turned out to be. It was because I had wished to be free some day, and so let myself be less free then then.

Again, that hard truth does not mean that you need to abandon intellectual life or your writing. If you really insist on a writer's life, you could always marry a mechanical engineer and let her salary subsidize your own wages (assuming she would be a she). But I've got another hard truth for you, I'm afraid. She probably won't have you. Or if she does, she probably won't stick with you, even if she loves you. It's important for most women at least to have the option of having children (no matter what they tell you when they're 18). And--probably due to the wiles of natural selection--giving the baby a safe and secure place to grow up is usually just as important. And guess who's going to give them that? Unfortunately it's the boring engineer. I'm sorry, Ryan. I'm so sorry.

Of course, another solution might be to study engineering but to maintain contact with the academic world by marrying an English professor. That would be a good way to have it both ways. Her lousy pay could supplement your good pay, and it wouldn't be so hard to bear if she decided to take a few years off while the kids were little. And if she didn't (as many women don't) then it wouldn't even be a bump in the road.

I'm sorry that that's the reality, Ryan, but it is. The sweet secret, though (aside from the fact that you'd probably find you like being an engineer) is that it doesn't last forever: not if you are smart and strong enough to delay your pleasure. People routinely live into their eighties these days, and your generation will probably see that go to the nineties and beyond. If you are smart now, and put your time in now, you could have almost half of that vast period (for humans) to do what you like, and to write what you like, because you would be free.

If I were you, I would consider what your parents are suggesting very closely. It sounds to me like they love you an awful lot.