What Skills Do English Majors Gain?
English majors excel at written and oral communications, persuasion, creativity, critical thinking, research, and editing - skills integral to a wide range of professions.
What Careers Have English Majors Pursued?
English majors most commonly go on to be attorneys, editors, teachers and professors, marketing and advertising agents, journalists, publicists and communications experts, and specialists in grant-writing and fund-raising.
Recent alumni include a legislative correspondent at the United States Senate, a digital production specialist at W.W. Norton, an award-winning fashion journalist, a development coordinator for a major charitable organization, a producer at Yahoo! Entertainment, an attorney, an editor at Carnegie Hall, a manager at the Vermont Agency of Human Services, a business development executive at Apple, and a sports editor at a Vermont newspaper.
Where Do UVM English Majors Go to Graduate School?
UVM English majors have gone to obtain advanced degrees in English and other fields from such schools such as Brandeis, Columbia, the University of Virginia, Georgetown, George Washington, Harvard, Penn, Rice, Tufts, Pittsburgh, Stanford, and Yale.
The Department of English Plays a Central Role in a Liberal Arts Education at UVM
- We offer courses and services to all UVM students in the department’s key areas of focus: literature and literary theory, cultural studies, and writing. These include the four key components of University-wide writing initiatives—the General Education Foundational Writing and Information Literacy (FWIL) requirement, Writing in the Disciplines, the Writing Center, and the Graduate Writing Center)—as well as a significant portion of the courses that satisfy the University’s six-credit diversity requirement.
- We offer one of the most heavily populated majors in the University, a minor in English and a minor in Writing, and a master’s degree in English.
- We foster scholarship and creative activity by students and faculty in a diverse range of areas, including critical race and ethnic studies, queer studies and theory, post-colonial literature and theory, and the writing of fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, plays, and screenplays. This is, of course, in addition to traditional areas of literary studies and theory and of rhetoric and composition.
- We partner with other academic departments and programs to offer mutually beneficial classes, including such programs as Film and Television Studies, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Global and Regional Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Jewish Studies.
- We serve the people of Vermont through outreach of various kinds, including service learning courses and the provision of graduate-level coursework for Vermont teachers.
Learn More About English at UVM.
Contact us at English@uvm.edu.
Advising questions? Minors, majors and prospective students can contact the English Department at English@uvm.edu or the Department Chair Mary Louise Kete at mkete@uvm.edu.