Karuna Khatri is graduating this June with an English literature major and minors in professional writing and honors. “I became an English major because I wanted to read books and get credit for doing it,” she said recently. “I thought it would be home to a community of like-minded individuals who saw the world differently and wanted to talk about it. I didn’t really know what I wanted to be, but I figured I needed to start with something. And I’ve stuck with it.”
Many students find in an English major at SPU this same sense of community, and perhaps fellow students “who saw the world differently,” as Karuna writes. “The English Department is so small that you really get to know your professors and classmates.”
Karuna singles out creative-writing courses as one place where size was especially beneficial. “These classes were usually made up of fewer than ten students, which lent to a strengthened sense of community and trust.”
She summarizes her experience with the literature major this way: “Studying English literature as an undergraduate feels like barely scratching the surface of the literary world. I feel that I haven’t read enough old classics or new rising authors. I wish I’d written more papers that I cared about and had more feedback about ways to improve. But I guess it’s this kind of insatiable dissatisfaction that makes people English majors in the first place.”