What Do You Do with a BA in English?
I graduated from university in 2006 with a BA in English Literature with a minor in Classical Studies. Not exactly the most practical of combinations, but it’s what I love and I’ve never regretted my time pursuing my studies. It certainly left a lot of concern for family and friends as they wondered into what kind of work I would get myself. And yes, while I remain adamant that one day I will become a professional writer and will never become a teacher, my in-between occupations leave me wondering sometimes.
Well, a half year of floating around without gainful employment finally led me to consider some actual government-sponsored career planning programs. By the next month I was in a conference room with about a dozen other career-lost people; I was also apparently only one of about three “new graduates”. So throughout the seven days of that career planning program, we did things like look at current job trends, learn about Myers-Briggs and how that relates to our preferences to thinking and working, and just really reach out to the extremes of things we’d like to do with what we know and have.
Oh, according to Myers-Briggs, if anyone’s wondering, I’m ENFP. It basically means I see too much potential in things and as such spend more time imagining than putting things to practice. Go fig.
Two major things came out of that program for me. The first was that a lot of jobs out there like to see a completed university degree with a job-specific one-year certificate on top of that – as I lacked those one-year certificates, that was a bit of a downer for me. The other thing was a bit more positive for me, though: within our group of career planning types, I was a massive geek who loved video games, anime, and all of that kind of delicious stuff. I was also with a group of people who quite actively told me to run with it.
Nevertheless, by program’s end, my ideal (and most practical in my mind) job was as a technical writer – the guy who takes the technobabble of the engineers and the specialists and turns it into normal-people words. Or something. Let’s face it, it sounded simpler than what it really is. As far as I was concerned, it was professional writing and it’d be far steadier work than as a novelist or something.
Come 2008, I came back to that organization and joined their job finding club; if career planning was figuring out what job you wanted, job finding was where they forced you to get it! So I went into that program thinking technical writer… and by the last half of the program we were basically supposed to be calling 10 employers a day. I barely had 10 employers I wanted to talk to, let alone 10 every day!
I started thinking a little more abstractly. “Everyone needs technical writers, right?” I started calling everyone and everything. Best Buy, Future Shop, random companies left and right… someone out there must need new technical writers! My need to fill call quotas (which I never did fill ever) led me to local video game developers. Vancouver’s a massive haven for that kind of stuff, so maybe some of them need people!
Yeah, not so much. The smaller game developers are so small that the bosses are basically doing the technical writing. They suggested I call Electronic Arts. I thanked them and said goodbye, knowing quite well that I had already tried to call Electronic Arts. Wasn’t gonna happen.
Looking through our company directories and stuff, I did find it amusing to see Cathy Weseluck’s name in there since she does voice acting coaching and the like as a job on top of her better known stints as the voice of Shampoo, Cybersix and “Kagome’s Mom”.
So I started thinking about anime and the local work that I’m so proud of, and where they did that work…
…and then I googled Ocean Production’s company information… and I found their phone number…
…and I told myself that I didn’t have anything to lose… also, that the career facilitators would yell at me if I didn’t try harder…
