I was chatting with Mandy (my dance teacher) after class on Thu, and she asked what I was doing in school (strangely enough, that was the second such question I was asked within a span of two hours that day), and I said, "My honors in English. It's completely useless."

Mandy said, "Don't be so hard on yourself! It's not useless!"

But, it is. I spent my undergraduate years doing mostly medieval papers:

• ENGL214 The Chivalric Quest
  
• ENGL215 Old English Literature
  
• ENGL224 Literary History of English Language
  
• ENGL307 Troy and Troilus
  
• ENGL315 Restoration and 18^th Century Literature
  
• ENGL320 Beowulf
  
• ENGL321 Old English

And my honors papers are:

• ENGL402 Medieval Studies: Old Icelandic
  
• ENGL406 Medieval Studies: Middle English Language to Early Modern English Language
  
• ENGL489 Research Essay (Manuscript Use of Anglo-Saxon Runes)
  
• LING410 Literary Linguistics

I'm gonna come right out to say that as much as I love these papers, especially Old English and Old Icelandic, my degree is completely useless. Were I to pursue it to Ph.D. level, it would still be useless.

For one thing, my school has more or less abolished the medieval studies department because so far there has been no hiring of any lecturer(s) to replace my lecturers who retired. Christine and Robert were the medieval studies department. As a result of their retirement, medieval studies papers aren't offered this year at all. (Well, actually there will be one girl who will be taking Beowulf, but it's more like supervised self-study, with an ex-student of Christine's guiding the study.)

Since the school doesn't see fit (yeah, yeah, it's always about the bottom-line, I know, and so C says) to keep medieval studies running, I can only infer from that the uselessness of what I'm doing.

And then I read this thread.

Cut. Cut. Cut.