Enthusiasm for university’s annual open house as high as ever

By Lethbridge Herald on November 2, 2024.

DAN O’DONNELL

 This past Saturday was the University of Lethbridge’s annual open house.

This is a fun event. Kids — well young adults — come from across the province to take a look at the U of L as a possible place to study next year.

A lot of the day is about the university itself — the library, gym, classrooms, residences, transfer credits, and so on. But a couple of times, groups of potential students come by to ask professors like me about the subjects they can study.  

This year, I’m told, there were more visitors than usual at our open house — a hopeful sign, perhaps, for next year’s enrollment. 

What wasn’t different, however, was the enthusiasm of our visitors. That was as high as ever. 

Moving from high school to what comes next — whether that’s university, college, or a trade — is always an exciting moment in a young person’s life. I remember when I was applying to university, lying on my parent’s floor with brochures and course catalogues and imagining all the things I might study: Genetics? Physics? English? Drama? Sociology? By the time I’d filled in my applications, I’d taken enough courses in my imagination to satisfy the requirements of half a dozen majors.

Nowadays applicants have many more sources of information available to them. But the excitement remains the same. For four hours on Saturday we sat at our booth answering questions about English from student after student and parent after parent. How many courses are required? (12 to 13 at a minimum).

 Can you combine English with Philosophy? Chemistry? Business? (Yes. Yes. And yes). 

And, of course, what can you do with an English degree after you graduate?

Actually, there were fewer questions about employment than in past years, even though there were more people at our table. 

One reason might be that we’d prepared a handout explaining just how well many English majors do after graduation (you can download a copy here: https://bit.ly/WCYDWT-1). 

But I also had the impression that a lot of high school graduates and, especially their parents, already knew the answer: humanities majors generally — and English majors especially — regularly tell us how important the work they did for their degrees has turned out to be in their daily lives. 

In fact, despite the stereotype of the unemployed English major, the vast majority of our graduates are both employed and using what they learned in our classes. Two years after graduation, somewhere between 80% and 90% of our majors have jobs (the actual rate varies depending on the economy), and nearly of them (95% +) tell us that they are using the skills and content they acquired on a daily basis.

Nor are these your mythical English-major-baristas. We don’t have an espresso machine in our department, so the knowledge our graduates are talking about is not how to make frappes. What they mean instead is how to read complex texts and write sophisticated arguments — skills that are highly valued in the modern economy and only going to become more important as more and more industries grapple with Artificial Intelligence. 

Most of the students and parents who came to see us at Open House seemed to know all this already. But that wasn’t what they were most interested in. 

What they really wanted to talk about was who and what they could study: Shakespeare? Beowulf? Margaret Atwood? Star Trek? Poetry? Novels? Drama? 

And, above all, they wanted to hear about our active creative writing community. A huge number of prospective students are looking for somewhere they can share their fiction and poetry and improve as writers.

At a time when all you seem to see is cynicism and conflict, it is good to sit down for a couple of hours with young people who are just beginning their adult lives. Their enthusiasm and hope for the future is inspiring. I can’t wait to see them in class next year!

Dan O’Donnell is Chair of the English Department at the University of Lethbridge. The Department of English hosts open mics and other creative writing activities for students and the community every month. For details, visit: https://www.ulethbridge.ca/artsci/english/open-mic