What Do You Do With a BA in English?

What do you do with a B.A. in English?

What is my life going to be?

Four years of college and plenty of knowledge,

Have earned me this useless degree.

I can't pay the bills yet,

Because I have no skills yet,

The world is a big scary place.

-Avenue Q

As I sat and listened to the opening lyrics of Avenue Q I had the sickening realization that they directly applied to me.  What will I do with my B.A. in English?  What the heck is my life going to be?

When I was younger I must have lived under the disillusion that everyone was visited by the job fairy upon graduating from college.  I had visions of myself working for a travel magazine and touring the globe.  Sadly, I haven't been visited by this allusive job fairy yet.  She must have went into hiding with the recession.

Now graduation is a little less than two weeks away and I'm left with the question, "What now?"  I suppose I am a little comforted at the fact that everyone feels like this when leaving college.  At least I'm not the only clueless twenty-two year old that ever existed.  It is a little disheartening, however, thinking about the thousands of twenty-somethings about to enter the "real world" without an inkling of which direction they're supposed to go.

I guess that's the point though; it's time for us to figure out things on our own.  We enter college thinking it's going to give us all the answers.  When we finally figure out that it won't, we stomp our feet and mope in the corner like the three year old we secretly wish we still were.

It's time for me to stop moping.

As my dear friend Mollie mentioned in the previous post, we've decided to take matters into our own hands and start a freelance writing business.  Sure, as we're starting out we'll have to get another job and, as much as I don't want to admit it, we may fail at being small business owners.  That's scary.  But there is the possibility that we will succeed!  We may actually prosper and love what we're doing.

I will always cherish my four years at college; they were some of the best years of my life!  I may now have this piece of paper that I feel is somewhat worthless, but that's not true.  I've realized that I may not be able to pull Virginia Woolf's use of the color red to represent masculinity in her novel To the Lighthouse into daily conversation.  I will, however, be able to use the self-determination I've demonstrated to myself over and over again.

Love, Alli


image courtesy of: http://www.etsy.com/people/MarianneLoMonaco?ref=ls_profile