The English major provides exceptional preparation for rewarding careers in publishing, marketing, consulting, publicity, philanthropy, teaching, writing, corporate communications, and online media. Many of our graduates also pursue graduate study in fields as varied as English, law, education, journalism, creative writing, communications, and marketing. Still others are published writers of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and playwriting.
Whichever career our majors envision for their future, we work collaboratively to mentor and encourage our majors to avoid both over-specialization and a random selection of courses; instead, students work intimately with their major academic advisor to design a course of study well-suited to each student’s individual professional aspirations, intellectual passions, and natural talents.
Among our most recent alumni, our graduates have attended graduate studies at Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, New York University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Colorado, the University of Iowa, The Ohio State University, and the film school at the University of Southern California. Alumni have also become editors at such publishers as Random House, McGraw-Hill, and Little, Brown, and at magazines such as Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Village Voice, and even America’s Test Kitchen. An additional recent graduate is a writer and performer whose debut solo play—developed in Ohio Wesleyan creative writing courses—has since been performed at sold-out shows in New York City.
You might also be surprised to learn that English majors are less likely than those who major in business, biology, and even legal studies, among others, to be underemployed in their first job. Or that in the salary race, English majors endure over engineers long-term, owing in no small part to recent findings by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which reports that the three attributes of college graduates employers consider most important are written communication, problem-solving, and the ability to work in a team.
