What do you do with a BA in English?

What is my life going to be?

Frankly I’ve no idea. The concept is both wonderful and terrifying. But for now it involves dealing with not being in college (a far greater adjustment than going to college in the first place), dealing with the need to earn money, and a whole new type of self-discipline.

Four years of college, and plenty of knowledge…

I took a class called “writing in a changing world,” and the professor admitted he had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but that persuasive writing was important, so he was going to teach that for the whole semester. That pretty much sums up my undergrad career.

My major, by the way, was called “Professional Writing,” a subset of written communication. When I tell people this, I get responses from “oh, so you want to write novels,” to “ummm so what do you do with that?” I most often get the latter, though it's really neither. While I took creative writing classes, I mostly specialized in journalism, PR writing, and types of writing people have never heard of and are difficult to explain, like technical and rhetorical writing.

Every step of my education involved some sort of discouragement.  Not on behalf of my teachers, but on behalf of the world at large. Papers and big magazines are in trouble, as people turn to the internet for free alternatives, book publishing  is thrown into flux by ebooks, and freelance writers and editors are becoming ever-more-competitive. 

However, armed with an optimistically stubborn streak, a rather schizophrenic portfolio, and a blog, I am forging ahead anyway. 

Here, I will document my adjustment to a non-academic life, my successes and mistakes in working in this uncertain world, and my efforts to take on my ever-growing list of creative endeavors. 

This shall be interesting… Down the rabbit hole I go.


Gold Star to whoever gets the title reference :)