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If you haven't been asked this question yet, you probably will be. A traditional myth about the English major is that it doesn't prepare students for any career path except teaching. While it's true that the English major has always helped to prepare a number of fine teachers, it's also true that English graduates today find themselves equipped to enter a vast array of career fields (see the English Advising Career Page for more information).
Whether you are interviewing for jobs, applying to graduate school or professional school, or just talking with your friends and family about what you're learning in college, it is useful to be able to articulate the skills and abilities that you have gained as an English major, and how those skills and abilities are transferable to both related and unrelated vocations and avocations after graduation.
The English Major Skills Workshop is offered during autumn quarter to undergraduate English majors by the Department of English and the UW Career Center. The objectives are to identify the kinds of skills that English students learn as they advance through the English major and to explore how those skills are transferable to other settings and fields outside academia. This is a critical task to accomplish because it grounds and orients a student in the first steps of a job and career search, helping to answer such questions as "What can I do?" or "What skills do I have?" We attempt to arrive at some answers through a variety of techniques and group exercises.
English Major Skills Workshops are offered at least twice, at different times,
during autumn quarter. A workshop announcement is sent out to enrolled majors
through the
englmajors
e-mail list,
and reservations are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. For more
information about workshop availability, watch your e-mail, or contact English
Advising at engladv@u.washington.edu.
The English Major Skills Workshop is designed to help you to identify the transferable skills you have developed in the course of your undergraduate education while studying English language and literature, and to develop techniques for articulating those skills in a meaningful way when you interview for prospective careers, graduate school admissions, or scholarships. The workshop is aimed at helping you to do these things:
To prepare for the workshop, take some time to complete the exercise called "Good Learning Experiences" (pdf format).
DIRECTIONS:
Think of three experiences that you remember well, in connection with the work
you've done in your major (a class project, a paper, a research endeavor,
etc), or done in conjunction with an internship or other activity. We will
classify these as Good Learning Experiences. A Good Learning Experience,
in this context, is one for which all of the following statements are true:
You enjoyed doing it.
You did it well.
You are proud of what you did.
Notice that the third element eliminates the merely enjoyable experiences in life and focuses on those in which you took an active role and achieved a sense of accomplishment. As you reflect on these good learning experiences, try to identify why you were proud of what you did, what you learned from the experience, and what skills you may have used to succeed.
In the workshop, we will
be actively searching for your strengths as well as for the transferable
skills you've acquired that are important in a variety
of jobs. These skills are most often associated with the good experiences that
you have had. We want you to go away from the workshop having identified as
many of these skills, traits, abilities, and qualities as possible -- an annotated
mental list that you'll take away with you and use as you approach the job
market or graduate education and try to answer the question, "What have
you learned by studying English?"
Some of the materials are available from the link below; however, please bear in mind that the Major Skills Workshop is an interactive, group-based activity that does not work well in an individual or virtual (web-based) format; the materials on line are an incomplete reflection of what's presented in the workshop and cannot help you to accomplish, by themselves, what the workshop is designed to do. We encourage you to participate in the next workshop in order to achieve the full benefit of the materials.
English Major Skills Workshop Presentation (materials developed by advisers from the UW Career Center and from academic departments; Dickensian theme created by Melissa Wensel).
from The UW Daily
, January 19, 1999
By Joe Nicholson
The Daily
Surrounded by
the brick-and-ivy psychological comforts of
academia, it is easy for undergraduates to forget that their class time is
limited and that they will eventually leave. Whether that be for the
world of work, graduate school, or something else, once outside the
security of the Quad, students will have to apply knowledge and skills
they've learned as undergraduates.
This can be especially difficult for liberal arts majors who don't
have the direct funnel to a career that pre-professional majors such as
engineering and business often have.
Two counselors in the Center for Career Services (CCS) and the
Undergraduate Advising Center (UAC) have teamed up to help make
the post-bachelor's degree world a little less intimidating for
undergraduates.
Susan Templeton of the CCS and Kelli Jayn Nichols of the UAC
have developed a workshop called "Major Skills" for students who
are unsure of how to use their education after graduation. The first
workshop was for political science majors in the winter of 1998. A
revised workshop was held last quarter. The workshops are
composed of 12-20 students and are two-and-a-half hours long. The
substance of the workshop is a group discussion, writing exercises,
and small group exercises which focus on transferable skills
developed as an undergraduate. Transferable skills include reading,
writing, analytical thinking, quantitative reasoning, researching,
information management and technology, problem-solving, public
speaking, critical thinking, leadership, and teamwork. Templeton says
that articulating these transferable skills is the goal of the workshop.
"Some of the things that are in this workshop could be put to use
directly towards completing a statement of purpose for a graduate
school application, applying for a scholarship, or a study abroad
experience; anything that requires you to reflect and describe what
you've learned.
Employers aren't going to say, for the most part, 'I want to hire an
English major.' They start talking more about 'I want to hire someone
who has a college degree. The field isn't as important as the ability to
do these sorts of things.' So it makes sense that people should be able
to reflect on their liberal arts education."
Templeton defines a successful
workshop "is when people feel
more confident, having a clear idea about what they know and can do
and a sense of hope out that there are options there." "The bottom
line is in the transferable skills," says Templeton, "but the flavor
of the
transferable skills is different from academic field to academic field."
from Paideia, Winter 2000 issue
by Susan J. Templeton, Career Counselor, Center for Career Services
It is one of those dreaded conversational moments: “So, you are majoring in…! What have you learned by studying…?” This question, along with “So, what are you going to do with your major when you graduate?,” stops many students cold. Yet, it comes up over and over again – from well-meaning Uncle Joe trying to make conversation at Thanksgiving dinner, on graduate school admissions applications, and from the prospective employer who asks it during the job interview. The Major Skills workshop, developed two years ago by Kelli Jayn Nichols, a former Academic Counselor with the Undergraduate Advising Center, Bonnie Lyon, an Academic Counselor for Political Science, and me, a Career Counselor from the Center for Career Services, helps students answer this question with confidence. The workshop is currently being offered in the College of Arts and Sciences in the departments of Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Drama, English, Geography, Political Science, and Psychology, as well as in the College of Education.
For Andrea M. Benneter, an English major who participated in a Major Skills workshop Fall Quarter, 1999, the experience paid off immediately. “The workshop helped me a lot, (it) built up my confidence…What helped me the most was simply to identify and assess my skills.” Soon after taking the workshop, a friend told Andrea about a part-time job opening. She used the ideas and information she gathered in the workshop to spruce up her resume and interview the next day. She got the job and is now working 15 hours a week as an editor at an e-business called OpenSpace.com. In sharing her news, Andrea wrote, “Fortunately, I really clicked with the two women who interviewed me. My confidence, however, came from the (Major Skills) workshop two days earlier. I was sure that my skills would be helpful for the job as news editor… Basically, I think that being enthusiastic, prepared and ready to act is key.”
In the Major Skills workshop, students identify and describe the skills they have learned and honed through pursuing studies in their academic field. The workshop begins with a before and after demonstration. In the before demonstration, the answer given to the question, “What have you learned by studying…?,” focuses on past accomplishments achieved while completing coursework and discipline-specific tasks. In the after version, the response modeled for the same question focuses on transferable skills gained from academic studies and provides examples of accomplishments that are clearly related to the competencies being sought in other settings. The emphasis is on future potential.
From this beginning, the workshop engages students in exercises and discussion that highlight the skills they have acquired and developed through their good academic experiences. It ends with students describing their skills and accomplishments in an interview role-play and then learning about the next steps they can take to put the concepts learned in the workshop into practice. The approach used in the workshop draws from the Dependable Strengths Articulation Process developed by Bernard Haldane, in which good experiences are examined to identify strengths or motivated skills. The Major Skills workshops are co-facilitated by career counselors, who have been trained to facilitate the Dependable Strengths Articulation Process, and departmental advisers. Departmental advisers present portions of the workshop and help tailor the content for their majors.
The idea for the Major Skills workshop originated from Kelli Jayn Nichols’s conviction that, if students leave the university unable to articulate what is distinctive about what they have learned through their academic experiences, then one of our most important tasks as educators, counselors, and advisers has been left undone. In the workshop, students identify and begin to appreciate the nuances their choice of major has given to the general transferable skills they develop in college. Most college students increase their analytical and problem-solving skills. Nichols contends that history students, for example, gain an appreciation and understanding for the importance of establishing a chronology of events and the role contingency plays in human affairs. These nuances put a special stamp on their analytical and problem-solving abilities which can be compelling when articulated clearly to an employer or a graduate school admissions committee. Recognizing these nuances can also increase students’ own perception of the value of their degree.
Bonnie Lyon, an Academic Counselor for Political Science, who was involved in the development of the initial Major Skills workshops, commented during an Adviser’s Education Program presentation, “Students walk away from this workshop seeing how their field of study has helped them develop skills.”
During the same program, Jody Burns, Director, Academic Services for Psychology, commented, “I believe in helping students reflect on their experience at the university. It is an important piece of our overall-advising task. …The more engaged students are, the more they will get out of their university education. This workshop provides students with an opportunity to ask, ‘What are we about in this discipline?,’ and to examine what “X” is as a discipline (from the perspective of) the pedagogy used in the major. It gives students the vocabulary to talk about their major and academic discipline and they get to meet other students and (discuss these issues) in a personable way.”
Describing her experiences offering the workshop for English majors, Melissa Wensel, Director of Advising for English, observed: “English majors tend to be a very chatty group. This workshop serves the purpose of building community. The workshop provides a personalized experience that makes students feel more a part of the department. English majors suffer from many myths about themselves. Many do not have a lot of confidence about their career prospects. …I like the peer involvement in the Major Skills exercises. It provides a sense of validation. Participants, both students and advisers, learn a new language for talking about skills. Participants walk out of the workshop with something concrete and tangible they can use.”
In the two years since this workshop was first offered, the benefits from it have been many. Student evaluations have been positive. Strong collaborative partnerships have developed among student services units and academic departments working together to help students obtain more value from their efforts and experiences at the university. Our hope is that we can find a way to involve more students in opportunities to reflect on their educational experiences and appreciate in positive ways what they have learned and the choices they have made at the University of Washington. For more information about the Major Skills workshops, e-mail stemplet@u.washington.edu.
