Remember 1972, when rock legend Alice Cooper infamously sang, “School’s out for summer! School’s out forever!?” Well, while we love the liberatory spirit and undeniably sick electric guitar backing this song, we are here to be the voice of reason and say: No, Alice Cooper, that’s not true. Think of the children! School’s out for summer — but school is not out forever.
Freshman year might feel eons away from college application season, but the planning you do now will help you identify your niche and set yourself apart when senior year finally comes. This is an uninterrupted stretch of time when you can focus on projects of your own, unencumbered by homework and school-year extracurricular commitments. Ready to develop your interests and get competitive for top-tier colleges? Here’s a guide for aspiring English majors.
Read
This may seem obvious, but this is something you can do all on your own (and entirely free with a library card!). It’s the most important part of getting to know the literary canon, cultural movements, and contemporary writers. Fancy credits on your transcript won’t mean anything if you can’t say in your own words what you read in your free time and why you love books.
Start keeping a list of everything you read, whether for fun or out of obligation (so, yes, track your guilty-pleasure fantasy reads alongside school assignments). We know right now it feels like you’ll remember all of this forever — especially banging your head against The Scarlet Letter — but the truth is you are consuming so much more content than you realize, and by senior year this reference sheet will be invaluable.
A lot of liberal arts schools will ask you about your “media diet,” and having a thorough history of your reading habits will help you demonstrate the breadth of your interests, your intellectual curiosity and self-driven work ethic, and general worldliness. In three years, you’ll have a living document of all the books, essays, blogs, journals, and newspapers you’ve engaged with.
Write
This next step is important whether you feel you’d like to take your English major in a creative direction (and pursue creative writing) or an analytical one (and pursue literary criticism and theory). Write as you read.
If you’re a creative writer, you might find yourself using your favorite texts as writing prompts or stylistic influences. That’s wonderful. Build up a portfolio of creative work in your genre of choice (fiction, non-fiction/memoir, poetry, or hybrid) or across genres. If you’re in the English major for the love of reading, keep a reading journal. It’s an informal space where you’re not being graded on your argument and you can explore your relationship to literature by thinking out loud.
Later on, this will help you write your college application essays, articulate your passion for the field, and clarify your focus — the period and genres you find most compelling, the scholastic conversations you’d like to contribute to in college, research you’d like to undertake, or holes in the canon you’d like to fill with your own writing.
Pre-College Programs
As you may know, many prestigious universities have summer pre-college programs where you can take courses at the collegiate level (and sometimes even gain college credits for it!). There are several benefits to attending a pre-college program — you make friends with similar interests, you often live on campus and get a feel for what college life (and what that specific school experience) is like, and, of course, you stand out from other students who are applying to your major but have not taken initiative to dive in outside of class. Plenty of colleges offer literature courses, and we have a list of top creative writing programs for high schoolers, too.
Online Courses
The same principle applies here, as well. It looks great to take initiative! And, honestly, enrolling in a class can help you get context for tricky material you’re curious to read but afraid to tackle on your own (we, for example, do not recommend reading Gertrude Stein without an introduction to modernism — swim in the Tender Buttons pool at your own risk).
You can go directly through colleges for online learning — Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, NYU, and other highly ranked schools have online classes that offer credit — but you can also find affordable and reputable college-level courses on Coursera, The Great Courses, LinkedIn Learning, and more.
Get Involved
Publishing sounds intimidating, we know, but it’s great to start creating a paper trail of your work and interests. Maybe you’re not interested in creative writing, but you do love literature, so you start a blog or substack of book reviews and cultural commentary. If you are a creative writer, you can send your creative work out for publication — you could start with your school’s local lit mag, or you can get involved with literary institutions geared toward high schoolers interested in publishing like Adroit Journal’s summer mentorship program.
Finally, see if you can get a job or volunteering opportunity that relates to your academic interests. Do you love your local library? Do they need help running events, book clubs, or children’s story hours? Do you have an independent bookstore nearby looking for interns to help with programming and inventory? Do any notable authors live in your area? You’d be surprised how generous writers can be, especially to students who take an interest in their work. If you’re able to find their personal contact information, or even their agent’s, you can query them. Write them a letter or email, and they just might write back. You might even plan an event if they’re willing to make an appearance at a reading series or class visit with your school.
The best part of all this is that it’s fairly flexible and tailored to your interests. You can design your summer however you’d like, and hopefully you get to spend a lot of time doing something that really interests and fulfills you. Congratulations on taking this first step toward your future, and have fun! School’s not out forever, but is it out for now so… rock on, compadres.
If you’re unsure where to start identifying your “niche,” planning your summer, and developing your interests, reach out to us today.