Why Major in English?

Kate Mesic, 2004
Attorney

People would hear my heavy accent and then scrunch up their brows and repeat, “English major?”

Yes, an English major. Growing up in Moscow, I was fortunate to be surrounded by my parents’ friends who were artists, writers, and actors. I grew up with a real appreciation for literature and the arts. But I knew that the real creative ability rested only with my father, who was an actor and a writer. My dad has always put an enormous emphasis on language, both in writing and speaking. I guess this is why my Russian is still in good shape. My father always said to me that language is the foundation of anything you will do or become, and I now know that he was and is right (as he still drills it into my head!).

We immigrated to the United States in 1997, and at UNF, at first, I was a psychology major, but one lucky day, I wondered into the UNF Pre-Law Program, and after speaking to the director Professor Martin Edwards, a former attorney, I was convinced that I was going to law school. He told me that if I was going to be a lawyer, the only major for me would be English. He was right.

As an attorney now, I look back and realize that the skills that I acquired at UNF made a tremendous difference both in law school and in the actual practice of law. My English classes taught me to both analyze literature and express myself in a way that I could not before. With the ability to write, comes the ability to speak, which is essential to a lawyer.

My favorite class was and still remains Professor Kimball’s Literary Interpretation. That class changed the way I looked at literature and more importantly changed the way I looked at any text. Two years after I took that class, I was seating in Torts at the University of Florida’s Law School, thinking how glad I was that I was used to reading complex texts and making sense of them because I was prepared to survive reading enormous amounts of material.

I graduated number one in the Department of English in May of 2004, and I still wonder how that happened. I worked hard, but I know that the professors in the Department made it possible for me to succeed, because if I needed help, they were there. They took the time to teach a Russian girl how to make English her first language and I am eternally grateful.