True Life: I'm an English Major

As the new school year has kicked off, I have had the opportunity to meet a vast number of people. As with any introductory conversation, various questions were asked and answered, such as: Where are you from? What are you involved in on campus? And, of course, What is your major? Being at TU, I have met countless engineers. My response to their major is usually, "I should have guessed that." Of course, like any polite human being should, they return the question: What is your major? With a moderate level of enthusiasm, I simply respond, "I'm an English major." Being a male English major at one of the nation's most renowned engineering schools has been an interesting experience. I find myself having few classes with the majority of my friends and fraternity brothers. I often find myself involved in conversations of a very technical,scientific, mathematical nature with no idea how to contribute any thoughts. It has been quite the black sheep experience.

Don't get me wrong, though, I have loved it. I tried the whole engineering thing my first semester at TU and I was not a fan. Over the last three semesters, I have found a love for Modernism. I find myself fascinated with fragementation. I love shifting perspectives. I love unhappy or unresolved endings. I love brutal realism hiding behind carefully crafted images and texts. In addition, I find that I can often express myself more accurately (and eloquently) through writing.

Recently, I have noticed that I speak somewhat differently than I type. In this instance, I am referring to text messaging. I often text my friends and love to keep in contact with them. However, I find myself putting an extreme amount of care into crafting each message. I simply care a lot about how a message looks. I care about how the words appear on the screen, and how that appearance relates to my meaning. I find this to be an interesting connection between thinking and technology because it certainly impacts my communication. All in all, technology seems to cause me to pay special attention to the visual.

 

Comments

I completely agree with your comments about texting! I always try to use good grammar, but with so many text messages lacking that these days, I find myself putting extra effort into that part of my texts. I think the emoji fad is also partly responsible for causing me to pay more attention to the visual aesthetic of my text messages because now, it's almost like no message is complete without one, and it can't just be any emoji; it has to be the perfect one. 

I'm so like you in that I put a lot of thought into my text messages and I have always prioritized the appearance and quality of my conversations with other people over speed of typing it out.  Nothing irks me more than recieving a text that uses z's in place of s's and is missing very important vowels, or worse, includes LOL.  I have always been a very formal texter and I think that trait signifies the fact that we have found our niche in college as english students.  As a student majoring in english, formation of words and the way things are written out is very important, as well as the analysis of words and works.  Like you, I came into college with a completely different plan for my major and career field, but it was the english class that I took freshman year, Major British Writers 1 with Dr. Engle, that made me realize how much I loved English, that I really wanted to study English rather than just about anything else. 

Sidenote: I wish there was a way to "like" comments on here because I would definitely "like" Meg's comment above. 

 

Also, in relation to Meg's comment, it's interesting to think about how emojis have become a part of our written language, how necessary they have become to texting comversations.  They have rather quickly become a dominant part of texting culture and have completely changed the way that conversations via text work.  I've never thought much about it until I read Meg's comment, but it would be something really interesting to study!