I used to think that majoring in something meant you would eventually know a predetermined set of things about that subject. English is one of my planned majors here at SMU; before I declared that major I had a faint idea of what all I thought I was going to learn.

I’d be able to list off all of Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order. I’d know about Ovid and Vergil, and Chaucer and all the other ancient influential dead people that they introduce you to cursorily in high school. I would read books by a very particular set of authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Franz Kafka.

The same would be true for poets, probably including T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, John Keats, and every other author that you’d find in an introductory anthology.

I thought being an English major meant knowing a very specific group of authors and books; not only that, but I thought that being an English major also meant liking all of those authors and books. It wasn’t until a few semesters in that I realized No. 1 I hated half these authors and No. 2 There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that.

Part of studying something is developing a taste. I didn’t have to like “The Tempest;” not many people did, including my professor. Not only that, but I can also enjoy works by authors outside the canon. Just because you don’t read Donald Barthelme in school doesn’t mean you can’t think he’s good.

There’s no secret group of English professors out there deciding the curriculum for classes across the country that get to tell you whether or not something you’re reading has literary merit. You can be an English major and enjoy “Twilight,” for heaven’s sake (and God knows I actually met one or two of those people in some of my introductory classes).

Your teachers are going to think that what they’re teaching you is the most important thing in the world, but that doesn’t mean you have to agree. If my Shakespeare professor didn’t think the bard’s work was God’s gift to man he wouldn’t have devoted half his life to teaching and writing about it. You read different kinds of works, you develop appreciation for different genres, but ultimately you get to decide what all you enjoy.

Thirty three credit hours of instruction and hundreds of pages of undergraduate essays might confer upon me a plaque with my name on it that says “B.A. English,” but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I learned anything.

People major in lots of things in college without ever having learned a thing. There’s a distinct difference between “education” and “employability.”

College helps some people with one, both, or neither of those things.

If you want to learn more about the liberal arts, for example, college can be of aid in that regard, but it doesn’t hold all the answers.

You have to do a lot of the work yourself. Read more. Write a lot. Take classes with professors who will constantly remind you how bad of a writer you are because that’s the only way you’re going to improve. Don’t accept that something is worth studying just because someone else told you it was. Trust the people more intelligent than you but never stop questioning them.

The same can be said for other fields too. Want to be an engineer? Teach yourself another programming language in your spare time. Make your own video game if it interests you.

What about being a scientist? Get a job working in a lab. Get some firsthand knowledge of the subject you’re studying. Your studies should extend far beyond the classroom.

Everyone ends up majoring in something while they’re at college, but few can say they majored in “life.” Experiencing what you learn more fully is the key to doing exactly that.

Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits The Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].