My major is "real," too, OK?

Every time I talk to an engineer or a pre-med or something, they have the nerve to ask me, “So what are you going to do with that major?” Even English majors, who I thought would be sympathetic, have a wide variety of (mostly evil, corporate) career paths available to them. They, too, express contemptuous curiosity in regards to my Program II Global Marginalized Cultural Art Studies degree. But then I guess they wouldn’t understand, because putting English above all other languages is so ethnocentric of them. How can they still teach “English” when they got rid of the Wolof department? It’s racist.

Well, I have news for you people with “real” majors. You are all total snobs. My major is not any less “real” than yours; I work just as hard, and I’m going to have a job when I graduate, just like you. Actually, I’m more likely to have one because my connections make me a lot better at networking.

I’m not sure why people think it’s acceptable, first of all, to ask me what I’m doing after I graduate from college. Obviously, I don’t know yet. The only people who do know are, like, pre-meds, and that’s because that’s their culture. The rest of us don’t have any plan, though. The fact is that I, like most of you, came to Duke because my parents went here. So although my boarding school friends judged me a little for not going to Harvard, after a lifetime of season tickets to Cameron, alumni donor thank-you weekends and private planes to the Final Four, Duke just made sense. Sometimes, you don’t need a plan for things to work out.

That’s why I don’t like the way people think my quote-unquote useless major will stop me from getting a job. One of my friends last year graduated with a degree in Social Criticism in Late Twentieth Century Independent Film, and now she’s working at McKinsey in a job that people told her you’d need “math” to do. Whatever. You don’t need math to have good family friends or connections. Now I’m not saying I’m going to work at McKinsey, because they’re an evil capitalist corporation and that Gupta guy is bad news. But I don’t need math to work at a good nongovernmental organization, either. I think Daddy knows someone at World Vision, and that’s all about feeding minority children, which I’m good at. See? That’s the power of networking!

If you have a “real” major, then I’m sorry. I know your problem sets make you super bitter, but you shouldn’t be taking it out on me. After all, you’re the one choosing to soullessly make money instead of doing something meaningful. Besides, if you all spent less time whining about your work and more time studying, then maybe you’d have a 3.9 GPA, like me. I have a few science major friends (they’re OK because they’re going to work for environmental NGOs), and they get really happy when they get a B+ in a class. I can’t believe it. When I get a B+, I call my dad so he can call the professor and fix it. I know what grade I deserve.

At first I thought the B+ problem was limited to my friends, but then I checked the requirements for Dean’s List with Distinction last semester, and I found out that even though you had to have a 4.0 for Trinity, you only had to have a 3.8 for Pratt! Talk about putting more pressure for Effortless Perfection on the already anxiety-riddled Duke womyn in Trinity! Why should I have to have perfect grades when an engineer is allowed to slip up? I see them sleeping in the Link all the time. Obviously if they were awake and studying, they would catch up to the rest of us.

I’ve heard that math and science classes are supposed to be, like, harder than many humanities classes, but I don’t think that’s true. I took my quantitative science and natural science classes just like my pre-med friends. I got an A in CompSci 82 and an A in Dino Bio, and I didn’t even have to study very much. I think science majors might just be lazy, or maybe they’re entitled because they’re at Duke. I know all about entitlement. I took a class on it. I got an A-, which is pretty bad, but I think the professor was just trying to prove a point.

I know it must be hard for you Prattstars (what a heteronormative nickname, by the way—you should be ashamed of yourselves) to understand this, but look: I work just as hard as you. I think my substantially higher GPA should back me up here. One time, I spent three weeks meticulously crafting a pop-up book for one of the three classes on fairy tales I was taking that semester. If that’s not an intense workload, I don’t know what is. So stop judging me for my major. Besides, I’m going to get a job, too, but unlike you, I’ll still have a soul.