Global First Year (3-Semester) - Bachelor of Arts - English

Program Description

The Career Accelerator is designed specifically for international students:

• Four semesters of professional development and career guidance
• Skills-based training and opportunities for exclusive internships
• Unique workshops, real-world experiences and cross-cultural group work

Originally established in 1965, the English Department operates on two campuses in Miami-Dade County and at the FIU Pines Center in Broward County. We teach graduate and undergraduate courses in Literature, Creative Writing, Writing & Rhetoric, Linguistics, Film Studies, and Exile Studies. In addition, faculty members teach in several programs overseas at partnering universities and colleges. Our distinguished faculty regularly earn recognitions locally, statewide, nationally, and internationally.

The English major empowers students by teaching them to read critically, think creatively, write clearly and express themselves effectively. FIU English majors enjoy a variety of professional and educational careers including: editing and publishing, teaching, technical writing, law, corporate and not-for-profit management, information technology and graduate study in English, Linguistics and other disciplines.

All English majors take a common core of twelve credits and then specialize in one of four tracks:

Literature

Students who find reading, discussing, and writing about literature to be exhilarating will enjoy the literature track. Exploring ideas that are socially, politically, environmentally, and culturally relevant, students will study multiple time periods and genres including film, deeply engaging with creative works and learning to think theoretically about literature, language, and society. With an emphasis on multicultural approaches to literature, students are trained to critically function within the increasingly diverse and global world in which they exist.

Writing & Rhetoric

Students interested in acquiring advanced skills in communication, argumentation, and writing thrive in this track. Through coursework that draws on current research in the field of Writing and Rhetoric Studies as well as the diverse resources of South Florida, students become rhetorically sophisticated readers and writers who adapt to and shape the 21st century multicultural, multilingual, and digital contexts in which they live and work. Our graduates are successful business professionals, scholars, and teachers whose cutting-edge approaches to writing, rhetoric, and communication make them particularly attractive to employers.

Creative Writing

The Creative Writing track helps students learn the craft of writing imaginatively by working with some of the top creative writing faculty in the country. Students study theory along with the best professional works in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction and develop their own voices in these genres through hands-on guidance and workshop feedback.

Linguistics

The Linguistics track prepares students to engage with the linguistic diversity of our increasingly globalized world. Miami-Dade County is home to over 2 million people who speak a language other than or in addition to English. This track offers an exciting array of courses in language structure and variation; monolingual, bilingual, and L2 development and processing; language universals, linguistic analysis, and sociolinguistics. The track helps prepare students for careers related to language or language teaching, or for graduate work in Linguistics or a related discipline.

The potential career paths for BA in English graduates are in the field of:

• Editing and Publishing
• Public Relations
• Technical Writing
• Education Administration
• Advertising and Media
• Secondary and Post-Secondary Teaching
• Law Business/Industry Management