Hello. My name is Jaden and I’m a third-year student here at UMass Lowell. I’m majoring in English with a concentration in Journalism and Professional Writing.

Currently, I’m an intern for the University’s Career & Co-op Center. The center has tons of great career, internship, and co-op resources for students so I will be blogging about my own experiences using those resources.

As I get further along in my college career, I’m starting to wonder what post-grad life will be like. One of the biggest questions on my mind is: what can I do with my major? It can be a daunting thought for sure, but I guess it’s better to consider my options before graduation sneaks up on me. For my third blog post, I decided to write about a Career and Co-op Center resource called What Can I Do with This Major? It shows potential career paths you could take based on your major. Picking a career, and even a major, isn’t an easy choice so I wanted to share a resource that could help with that!

First, I went to the Career and Co-op Center webpage, then to the section for undergraduate students, and clicked on the Exploring Majors and Careers link since the website is linked on that page. Getting to it was very easy.

Once I was on the actual website, it got even easier. One of the tabs at the top of the page gives the option to view all majors and I was able to find English under the Language, Cultures, and Humanities category. I was also able to find English and journalism listed under the Communications category as well.

For English, there were tons of different career options since it tends to be a broad major. A few areas English majors could go into were writing/editing, technical communication, publishing, education, advertising, public relations, law and business. I was glad to see that technical communication was on the list since it was a path I was considering. However, the law option surprised me because I always thought only political science or criminology majors went into law.

Each area also listed job responsibilities, types of employers, and strategies to gain skills for that type of job. For example, as possible job responsibilities, technical communication listed technical writing and editing, science and medical writing, grant and proposal writing, software and hardware documentation, information technology writing, human-computer interface design, corporate communication and training, and mechanical communication.

Overall, this website was super helpful. The career information was extremely straightforward and easy to understand. Now I know exactly what my career options are with an English degree!