UMass Boston

English courses at UMass Boston provide an appreciation for diverse perspectives, a sense of historical and cultural change, and an ability to distinguish the relevance of texts to their times and to the broader human condition. Students will also realize the essential benefits of a liberal arts education, including empathy, creativity, and sociocultural awareness.

Courses across the English curriculum also have the following goals, which are to help each student develop essential skills that can be used in any field:

1. Help students to engage in the study of literature, language, film, and visual, digital, and multimodal texts and develop new habits of mind and new forms of critical thinking
2. Engage students in the close reading of primary texts, encouraging sustained reading, attentive reading, and re-reading
3. Develop students’ ability to engage in interpretation, fostering the ability to create new insights and arguments
4. Encourage students to understand and appreciate the creative, imaginative, and aesthetic elements of literature, language, film, and visual, digital and multimodal texts
5. Ask students to draw complex connections between texts and their historical contexts, cultural environments, and literary histories
6. Empower students to become meaning-makers through multiple forms of writing that allow them to experience writing as a form of thinking, including creative writing, analytical writing, professional writing, and digital writing
7. Connect students’ creative thinking and analytical thinking, encouraging them to both become both creators of texts and critics of texts
8. Build students’ inquiry and research abilities by encouraging them to work with both primary and secondary source material, develop research methods using library and database resources, connect research to the writing process, and practice the skills of organizing, developing, and supporting research-based arguments
9. Foster students’ enjoyment of reading, writing, and thinking about imaginative texts, emphasizing that rigorous intellectual work is a challenging yet fun endeavor

Now that you have a sense of the skills you will learn, see Careers in English for the types of careers you may be prepared to pursue.