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I’m sure we’ve all been in this situation: you meet someone new—whether it be a family acquaintance, a customer at work, or that cutie at the local coffee shop—and within minutes the small talk leads to questions about your education. And when it finally comes up that you have decided to dedicate at least four years of your young adult life to pursuing a degree in English, the inevitable response will go something along the lines of, “Why?”, “What are you going to do with an English degree?”, or the ever popular, “Oh, so you want to be a teacher.”

Why English? Because I think that reading is fun, and everyone’s told me that any degree could be as useless as the next, so why not have fun while pursuing a pointless degree? I’m not sure what I’ll do with my degree, other than admire and appreciate my overflowing bookshelf that is the result of over four years of becoming engrossed and confused by every sort of character, from Milton’s Satan to Pynchon’s Oedipa. Who knows, maybe I will be a teacher, but that’s not something I’m ready to pursue yet. The beauty of an English degree is that the opportunities are endless (as long as it doesn’t involve any algorithms or equations; numbers ceased being my friends once they started hanging out with those letters—letters belong in words, not in math). Sure, I’m probably not going to step off that stage in June and walk into my office with a career waiting for me, but I was never really planning on that. For now, I’m going to keep on pursuing my purportedly useless degree, and I’ll build and find my career along the way.

I was unfortunately unable to attend the department’s Full Stop Friday last week due to my part-time job (I keep telling myself that my degree will get me farther than retail despite the naysayers), but I did find time this week to plan for my life outside of the classroom. While not as fun or filling as Full Stop Friday, the English department’s “Life After English” presentation was informative and hopeful. To be honest, it made me want to do a little bit of everything, and I may do just that.

One of the first suggestions of the afternoon was to continue your education by doing a Master’s program. So as long as your bank account will allow it, there’s always that. I’m planning on starting a Master’s program next Fall, with the possibility of pursuing a career in publishing/editing after completing yet another year of school in a college program. If you told sixteen-year-old me that I’d have at least another six years of school after graduating high school, I probably would’ve laughed in your face. But that’s the beauty of undergrad—you learn and develop from more than just the books, adapting to meet the needs of your constantly changing world, and you come out better because of it.

After learning about the numerous college and university programs that are available for post-grad English students, for the first time I felt that my undergrad degree choice had opened almost too many doors to choose from! If any English undergrads out there are still feeling hesitant about pursuing a degree in a subject you love because you’ve heard you won’t get a job out of it, don’t give up yet! It may take a little more work than your Engineer friends, but if it’s what you love you’ll be willing to work hard to find a career worth working in—and besides, we get to have all the fun in undergrad while all the other guys are locked up studying away in their labs.

More school is also not the only option after undergrad. I could find a job implementing my honed communications skills, or sell my writing abilities as a free-lancer, or network my way to the top to find those jobs that never even get posted. It’s a scary and unfamiliar world, but it’s out there waiting for the eager graduates. And if all else fails, I’ll teach! I’m not ready to set foot into a suburban Canadian classroom as the teacher, since it feels like I just left my spot at the pupil’s desk, but the travel bug in me would be more than willing to teach internationally.

All this is to say that, no, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my Bachelor of Arts in English once I cross that stage and hold that multiple-thousand dollar piece of paper in my hand. But I do know that the possibilities are endless. And despite the dozens of essays I wrote each year, and the obscure terms I’ve had to learn throughout my degree (kunstlerroman anyone?), I’ve had fun making my way through my undergrad.