What Do You Do With a BA in English?

Here they come. Faster than you can say Pomp and Circumstance they will be teeming out of the hallowed academic halls of our nation's colleges and universities. It’s the class of 2008! They are fresh from commencement services, capped, gowned, and tasseled, diplomas in hand and ready to face the real world. Unfortunately the real world seems to have a higher quotient of real as of late. As in REALLY scary economic forecast. As in “What am I REALLY supposed to do with my concentration in Medieval and Renaissance Literature?” As in “I guess I don’t REALLY mind moving back home with my parents.”

This year the usual springtime fare of graduation stories in the media about the hottest gifts for grads have been replaced with topics a bit less frivolous (bad news for the fountain pen industry and the publishers of Oh the Places You’ll Go) such as a little problem called...um... finding a job. Today the first item on the WSJ’s Career Journal homepage is entitled “Help Unwanted” about the drop in employment ads, and a few weeks ago they there was “For Class of '08, Scramble for Jobs.”

When I read these headlines it is, as Yogi Berra put it, “like “déjà vu all over again.” As it was not so long ago(although now a little bit longer ago than I wish to admit) that I was a fresh faced grad armed only with an English degree heading out into an economy that was struggling and an unemployment rate that was soaring. And now dear reader, may I point your attention to Exhibit A. This picture of myself and two good friends was taken one night in the spring semester of our senior year of college. At that juncture not one of us had concrete post-college plans: an English major, a History major, and an Art History major. We are a veritable triumvirate of unemployability. I don’t know if you can tell(as I have shrunk the picture to minimize the glare off the very blond highlights I was sporting at the time), but the newspaper we are crouching in front of has a main headline that reads “College Graduates Will Face Dim Job Prospects.”

Two things strike me when I look at this picture. 1. I really had no idea what I was in for at that point. 2. I wish someone had pointed out to me that as long as my eyebrows were black, my hair should not be blond. The truth was our prospects were less than stellar. Following graduation I lived at home. I did temp jobs. I got my heart set on positions that I didn’t get. And I drove my extremely patient parents nearly insane. I’ll never forget hitting send to apply to one job with an annual salary that I could never have afforded to live on only to immediately get an automatic reply from the employer that they had already received over 1,000 applicants for the job and would soon be in touch if they were interested. Needless to say, I didn’t hold my breath.

Eventually I found that job searching requires striking a balance between focusing in on what you want and keeping an open mind about what you will consider . I knew I wanted to do marketing. And I ended up doing marketing… in the healthcare industry, not an area in which I was particularly interested. But, just the same I got the knowledge and acquired the skills(and the corresponding bullet points on my resume) that I needed so that I eventually I found a job marketing in an industry that did interest me. And in the reverse situation, I had a friend who took a marketing job at a company she liked even though she had an inkling she really wanted to do graphic design. She took classes at night and built her portfolio while meanwhile doing a great job at her day job as a marketer. And when a design position became available within the company, she applied and got it.

My initial instinct was that I should get a safe job within a big company that had a midtown address and a name everyone would recognize at cocktail parties and family gatherings. But in the end I went with a smaller, younger company than I envisioned. And it was the best decision I could have made. I didn’t make a copy or get anyone but myself a single cup of coffee in my first year. But I did get great experience and plenty of opportunity to learn all sorts of new things.

In her article on job hopping for the Boston Globe, Penelope Strunk suggests a similar strategy of taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves as a path to the job you want. She writes: “Tech is hot. Healthcare is hot. And you don't need to be a software developer or changer of bed pans. In fact, any tech company or healthcare company needs sales people and marketing people, and accountants, and all the other types of people who could, possibly, get stuck in an underperforming company, but clearly have the ability to change sectors without dumping their expertise.” She also addresses the idea that what you think is the ideal job for you, might not actually be.

So, while I know from my experience that job hunting in a troubled economy is certainly no picnic, I also know that the '08ers are up to the challenge. It’s not likely that anyone is going to hand over a dream job to go along with that diploma in a good or bad economy. But I found, as I am sure these graduates will find that what you think is your dream job and what it actually turns out to be might be quite different, and you’ll never know unless you try. Or as our favorite Dr. put it:

“You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself
in any direction you choose.”