English - Career Planning

The Hendrix College English Major prepares students for a variety of rich and vibrant future careers

• Trained in critically engaging with and creating a variety of media, our English major affords students a solid foundation in Literary Studies with the option to emphasize Creative Writing, Film and Media Studies, or a deeper exploration of Literary Studies.
• Through engaging with, writing about, and thus producing their own texts, our English majors learn a keenness of reading and expression that helps them to solve problems.
• Through in-class discussion and out-of-class reading, students collaboratively solve problems by putting texts into conversation and learning ways of reading and thinking about the world beyond the text.
• Our students learn to write reflectively, analytically, persuasively, lyrically, and with curiosity and urgency.
• Students learn that writing itself is a process, one that requires revision and redirection so as to bring a reader’s understanding and a writer’s intention into closer proximity.
• Through in-class workshops and office conferences, students not only become accustomed to receiving feedback but also skilled in giving feedback, in learning to critique with productive and supportive ideas.
• Our students discover that writing and speaking aren’t arbitrary tasks of class requirements but are substantive and meaningful ways of interacting with others; in other words, students become discerning of purpose and intention in writing and speaking.
• Our majors learn how every act of reading is an engagement with another perspective, and thus—through textual analysis and cinematic analysis, through writing and reading—our students learn how to experience empathy for other experiences and to write in ways that might yield empathy and meaning.
• Our major prioritizes self-authorship, in that students learn to lead by way of owning their ideas and defending them thoughtfully, as they move toward a self-directed and individually-chosen/completed capstone thesis project.
• The English major offers students a rigorous education in reading, writing, and self-authorship, as students discover the urgency between their in-class study and its use-value to their lives and in the world beyond the classroom.

The Hendrix College English Major supports Students in career discernment

Our department’s attention to rhetorical and expressive writing, media literacy, history and theory of texts, primary document analysis, and digital practice prepares our students for outside internships and on-campus co-curricular experiences (including our school newspaper, The Profile, and our literary magazine, The Aonian). We work with students to help them translate the skills they gain through internships, classroom experience, and co-curricular on-campus projects into professional endeavors.

Recent internship sites include the following:

• KUAR/National Public Radio
• The Oxford American Magazine
• Arkansas Department for Environmental Quality
• Butler Center for Arkansas Studies
• Young Chicago Authors
• Arkansas Educational Television Network/PBS
• UCA Torreyson Library Archives
• Christ Episcopal Church
• PBS Frontline
• Heifer Village and Urban Farm
• Our House
• Et Alia Press
• Heifer Village and Urban Farm
• Our House
• Et Alia Press
• American Society of Magazine Editors Internship Program
• Various other schools and politicians’ offices

What can you do with an English major? Everything. We appreciate this graphic, which maps future careers in relation to intrerests and skills:

You may also find the “What can I do with this Major” database helpful. Click the link above to access this resource.

Career Outcomes

Our graduates leave Hendrix with the ability to read and write critical and creative texts, skills that yield the ability to thrive within graduate school (in English, Creative Writing, Film and Media Studies), law, education (ranging from early childhood to graduate), public policy, community organizing, museum curation, entrepreneurship, non-profit leadership, arts administration, public media, journalism, development, politics, ministry, creative writing, filmmaking, public relations.

Our students have gone on to graduate/professional school at institutions including the following:

• Harvard University
• University of Chicago
• University of Mississippi
• University of Southern California
• Clinton School of Public Service
• University of Florida
• University of Iowa
• University of North Texas
• Rutgers University
• University of Wisconsin, Madison
• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
• University of Arkansas School of Law, Fayetteville
• University of Arkansas Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law
• George Mason University, Antonin Scalia Law School

Hendrix College English Majors become alumni who flourish

Graduates have gone on to work as lawyers, political consultants, magazine editors, journalists, entrepreneurs, teachers, medical doctors, librarians, novelists, photographers, literary agents, filmmakers, poets, ministers, non-profit leaders, motivational speakers, life coaches, production managers, and many more fields.

Several very recent examples include the following:

Ellie Black ‘18 has interned with Oxford American and Copper Canyon Press. In June 2018, she was awarded a prestigious national fellowship at the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. Her poems have appeared recently in or are forthcoming from Split Lip Magazine, Best New Poets 2018, DIAGRAM, and others. She has received awards from the C.D. Wright Women Writer's Conference and the Poets' Roundtable of Arkansas and has been a semifinalist for the Adroit Prizes in Poetry and the Boulevard Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets; she also won first place in the Split Lip Poetry Contest Volume 1, judged by Paige Lewis. Black is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, MS. She is also a freelance editor and PR/marketing assistant, a poetry reader for the Yalobusha Review, and an Associate Editor at Sibling Rivalry Press.

Kim Lane ‘13 works as an entrepreneur, speaker, and business executive who travels the world giving lectures and workshops on entrepreneurship, vulnerability, empowerment, and inclusion. Lane is currently the Career Connections Local Relationship Lead for Facebook, where she supports the Arkansas operations of Facebook Career Connections, an initiative that connects innovative, Facebook-trained collegiate talent with local businesses to bolster the local economy and strengthen the state’s tech-talent pipeline. She is also the Southwest Regional Representative for the Kauffman Foundation’s 1 Million Cups program, where she manages over 200 organizers running the entrepreneurial education program in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arkansas. She is a Senior Advisor for the Global Entrepreneurship Network, where she has mentored entrepreneurial ecosystem builders in Nepal, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia and St. Lucia.

Lance St. Laurent ‘13 earned his M.A. in Film/Cinema/Video Studies from the University of Southern California, and--after working as a substitute teacher and projectionist--is currently working toward his Ph.D. in film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.