When I came to MIT, I wanted to do computer science (Course VI). However, at the end of my first semester of freshman year, I decided to become a math major. I changed my major once again at the beginning of sophomore year, this time deciding to become a philosophy major, an unusual choice for an MIT student. Throughout all these changes, the only thing that remained constant was my decision to take one literature class per semester. During my senior year in high school, I had already developed a keen interest in literature, but I still considered it somewhat of a "hobby", something that I did in my leisure time, not an activity that could eventually become my second major.

But the unexpected became reality. At first, I desired to complete my minor in literature. As time went by, however, I ended up taking more and more literature classes for their own sake. Thus, I had so many literature credits that Prof. Diana Henderson, my advisor, told me to consider becoming a literature major. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to follow through with Prof. Henderson's advice. Having taken so many classes with the Literature department, I had already grown fond of the subject and of the faculty. The department made me feel at home, and my professors showed me day in and day out that scholarship and research could be combined with excellence in teaching, so I had no reason to decline the chance of turning into a literature major.

Furthermore, I noticed that Literature helped me in my philosophical endeavors. While philosophy taught me to tackle human problems in an organized and rational manner, literature taught me the "flesh and bones" aspect of seemingly abstract problems. As a result, literature also taught me that reason is just one part of reality, not the whole of it. I think that all these insights, and many others, gained with the Literature department at MIT will help me in my graduate religious studies at Harvard Divinity.

When I was younger, I was always reading half a dozen books at a time. Book stores and libraries are still some of my favorite places and the smell and feel of yellowing pages is almost as important to me as the knowledge contained in them. I always had lots of time to read until I came to MIT and found myself buried in dry textbooks. Taking literature courses started as a means to being able to read books during the academic year, not just during Winter break and Summer. I love to study and learn about the scientific universe, but I also know that reading literature is just as necessary in understanding the universe for me. My passions have always been reading and riding horses and I plan to always to both. Now that I have graduated, I'm working at a barn in California, a little over an hour away from my home town of San Francisco. In a year or two, I will attend veterinary school in order to become a large animal vet, so that I may continue working around horses for my entire life.

During my senior year, I memorized all of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." If you've never read "Howl," know that it takes more than thirty minutes to read aloud, and contains such gems as weeping "at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music," and those desperate poets "who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg."

Lines like those make me high. Of course, I knew that in high school, and I still pushed myself through two painful years of classes in math and biology at MIT just because it seemed like the right thing to do. Most MIT students don't think much about serious work in the humanities. But I don't just want to read poetry, and literature isn't simply a weekend hobby for me – I want to think and write about it critically.

The writing and speaking skills I gained in MIT Literature courses have served me well in areas from everyday life to graduate school applications to my current job as a department liaison at MIT OpenCourseWare. The larger philosophical and aesthetic understanding that literature has given me goes even further.

Memorizing Ginsberg is more fun than memorizing reagents for organic chemistry. And the thing is that for me – in my life – it's also been more useful.

As a child, I used to stay up until the early hours of the morning reading novels. That hasn't changed much, though now I don't have to hide under the covers from my parents. I complemented these novels with plays in school: I read them, performed them and eventually directed them. Of these plays, Shakespeare's were among my favorites, primarily because of his wonderful language. At MIT, I continued exploring these interests by majoring in literature, focusing on drama and poetry. I found the classes fun, the professors friendly and helpful, and the environment very welcoming.

I am now starting my first year as a graduate student in mathematics at Harvard. Even though I'm no longer actively pursuing literary studies, my interest in reading and discussing plays and novels still remains. And many years of English papers have taught me to write, a skill that will prove crucial in the coming years. I leave MIT's literature department with fond memories.

I arrived at MIT planning to pursue a degree in Course 6 and a career in finance.  I signed up for a film class my first semester, just hoping it would add "variety" to my schedule – and I've been addicted to Literature courses ever since.  A course on modern drama here, a class on Austen there... Before I knew quite what was happening, I'd fulfilled most of the requirements for the major.  The joys of reading and analyzing texts I might have anticipated, but the pleasures of the MIT Literature classroom took me by surprise.  The professors in Literature are deeply committed teachers and scholars, and they bring their research into the classroom in exciting ways.  I learned to enjoy reading not just as a private experience, but as a scholarly and collaborative one.  Literature courses changed the way I thought about books, and by extension, altered my understanding of the world at large.  My only regret, upon graduating, was that I hadn't had time to take more of them.

In the end, I did get that Course 6 degree (alongside the Literature one), but Wall Street fell by the wayside.  Now I am in the English PhD program at Stanford, and I couldn't be happier.  I can say without exaggeration that becoming a Literature major changed the course of my career, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

I am halfway through a PhD in Materials Science at Northwestern University and I consider the literature courses I took at MIT to have been integral to my education as a scientist.  In graduate school a certain level of technological savvy is assumed, but the ability to tell a clear, concise, and compelling research story sets one apart.  At every school I visited, professors wanted to talk about my literature minor and my junior year studying at Cambridge University.  One professor offered me a spot in her lab based on my minor because she wanted students who could write grants and give compelling presentations.  The literature department wrestled with Cambridge University's 800 year old bureaucracy so I could sit a literature paper and worked with me to fashion a minor out of courses taken at MIT, Cambridge, and Harvard.  I feel my literature minor was the perfect counter-point to my engineering degree and allowed me to leave MIT a happier, more rounded person.

My serious interest in literature began with a rather unfortunate first paper for a Shakespeare HASS-D. It was pretty bad; it said nothing poorly. Fortunately, that paper's hapless existence made me realize many things, the most important of which was the difference between intellectual curiosity and intellectual engagement. Like many (if not all) MIT students I was interested in ideas – how things work, formulas, and paradigms. What I didn't have (and didn't know yet that I didn't have) was a way to really get at these ideas. A way that I actually cared about and enjoyed on a visceral level enough to do the work of understanding and learning. What I found in literature was a material and a system that yielded and structured fascinating questions and answers – and on a basic level, was pleasurable. (A quality that should never be underestimated when choosing a class and/or major.) So that first miserable paper, in its particular wrongness, made me realize that (1) this was something I liked that I wasn't willing to cede and (2) literature could let me in on the ground floor of a lot of big ideas if I really tried. I continued to take classes in the Literature department, decided to pursue a doctorate in English at UCLA and have enjoyed fame and fortune ever since. Well, relatively speaking. I am truly appreciative of the singular education I have received and thankful daily for the perception I've learned. As I begin writing my dissertation on Asian American literature, I know that the questions that engage me now – questions about race, narrative, history – all have their roots in the wealth of opportunities, organic and inorganic, available in the MIT Literature department. That HASS could change your life.

There is a curious superstition that one is either cognitively equipped to study the humanities or the sciences. It is a superstition to which I was not immune. I came to MIT with every intention of majoring in theoretical mathematics -- on the heels, however, of a very difficult decision that pitted Harvard against MIT, since I was distressed by the prospect of missing-out on the liberal arts. But as I explored philosophy, literature and history as a freshman, I realized how much I enjoyed the challenge of translating the logical skills I was developing in my science and math courses to problems presented in literary studies: questions of how language and imagery functions or problems of gender and representation, for instance. I found that alternating my time between analyzing poems and dissecting proofs ultimately made me stronger at doing both. I unconsciously became a de facto minor in Literature and in my junior year decided to add a literature major to my (then primary) major in Math.

The Literature department was extremely flexible in allowing me to take courses that interested me most deeply and many of the faculty were unusually (if not heroically) tolerant in allowing me to generate, research and pursue my own particular intellectual agendas. After leaving MIT, I ultimately decided to pursue a career in literary studies. Currently, I am working towards my PhD in English Literature at Rutgers University. My area of focus is the philosophical and literary struggle between textual and pictorial aesthetics in the British and European Enlightenment.