Reflective Writing 8

 Name              : Meillita Puan Maharani

ID Students’   : 2223200081

Class               : 4A

Course             : Academic Writing

Reflective Writing 8

            The argument about we should pursue an English degree to be more appealing to employers as shown by the continued drop in enrollment in English degree programs was not properly motivating students. Data from Humanities Indicators, A Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, joins the content from the 2018 ADE study, confirming that the number of people obtaining English degrees has fluctuated over decades. Students may believe that a communications degree is more applicable to a professional context or provides more practical skills than what is seen to be a nebulous, traditional English degree, hence the number of students pursuing one is increasing. A recent review of job postings that included the word "communications" in the title—for example, communications specialist, social media communications associate, digital communications coordinator, and communications officer—uncovered required skills and experiences that were not exclusively relevant to communications students.

            Many students choose their degree programs based on their pre-professional interests, according to Louis Menand (2010) in The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. He claimed that the usefulness of humanities degrees has been questioned because there aren't usually clear connections between undergraduate majors and employment paths. The undergraduate degree was now considered a distinct facet—a preparatory stage—of one's college pursuits, occurring before career education and training. Harvard changed the structure of academic degree programs by making a bachelor's degree a prerequisite for admission to medical and law schools; the undergraduate degree was now considered a distinctively separate facet—a preparatory stage—of one's college pursuits, occurring before career education and training.

            These curricular changes, according to Menand, have had an impact on twenty-first-century humanities degree programs because they resulted in "the idea that liberal arts education is by its nature divorced from professional education" (2010, pp. 49–50), and many students today expect their college investment to directly lead to jobs and income. We began to rethink the idea after considering how knowledge is formed. Our original goal was to create materials to help college students understand the value and opportunities of English and writing studies, but as we reflected on our own experiences in college and professional settings outside of universities, we were compelled to examine what drew us to English studies in the first place.

            We found ourselves pondering on aspects of our personal and professional lives that influenced our academic trajectories as we sought to generate arguments that would push students to reconsider the significance of writing and English studies degrees. "Autoethnography is a way of giving voice to personal experience to increase sociological understanding," Sarah Wall (2008) noted (p. 39). "Reexamining the events we've lived through and the tales we've told about them before allows us to broaden and deepen our understandings of the lives we've led, the culture in which we lived, and the work we've done," Carolyn Ellis (2009) claimed (p. 13). This study method allowed us to look back on our life as undergraduate and graduate students to identify effective arguments and tactics that we could use with today's students. Furthermore, this could be a useful research method for those working on similar projects. An Industry Professional Returning to English Studies—Reflections from Lara Smith-Sitton Like Shannan, when I started my undergraduate degree, I came to college with a love of writing and reading, but I felt I needed to connect this to a career path. Most of my peers were pursuing business degrees with plans to work in accounting firms or science degrees with goals of medical school.

            The process of writing autoethnographic narratives about our experiences was a critical thinking exercise. Critical thinking, according to Peckham, is analyzing facts and information to conclude. We realized we needed to take a different strategy, one that focused on persuading students to engage with the information presented and then reassess the variety of academic degree alternatives that could help them achieve their professional goals. Peckham's (2010) insights on critical thinking were an important part of our approach: "we need to provide them alternative methods of thinking and writing that match the changing social [and work] settings in which they will increasingly find themselves" (p. 50). We acknowledge that this project is still in its early stages, but we feel that by taking this approach, students will get more involved in these discussions and reconsider the statistics around college degrees and professional employment.