UCLA’s English major allows student the opportunity to explore English beyond the traditional classroom

She read. She wrote. She studied Shakespeare…Milton, Chaucer, Blake and a number of other literary legends who made up the English literature canon of the 21st century. As a third-year English student, Megan Beauchamp completed the majority of the core requirements for her degree during the 2010-11 school year. Her love of reading and analyzing literature allowed her to appreciate the heavy reading load that belonged to most English courses. In fact, she had encountered an extensive number of novels, poetry, short stories and political essays, which expanded her understanding of the past and the present through writing.

Despite many non-English students’ beliefs, English courses were not filled with grammar lessons and punctuation workshops. If truth were to be told, English courses could not have been more different. “A typical English lecture is centered on the professor’s interpretations of the texts,” stated Beauchamp. An English professor’s presentation typically presented one perspective of a text, while other views were often left untouched for students to formulate on their own. Then the students were typically expected to explain and provide evidence for their own perspectives of a text in an out-of-class essay. As a result, English courses were aimed to develop students’ abilities to communicate their own analysis of literature through writing. Beauchamp continued, “This major has…Click Here to Continue Reading.