“A Day in the Life of an English Major” is pretty much what it says on the tin: A look at how the elusive Rice English major spends their time each day. Do they really spend six hours a day reading Mark Twain up in a tree, as the pre-med students suspect? Do they hide out in the library waxing poetic about Sylvia Plath, like the Econ majors hypothesize? Find out in this month’s edition of “A Day in the Life of an English Major.”
Hello, hello, hello! This is “Day in the Life of an English Major,” and let me just say: Welcome! We’re happy to have you over here in our little corner of the Internet. My name’s Maggie Smith and I’ll be your host today. For this month’s “Day in the Life,” I’m thrilled to share the experiences of one Andreea Calin, a senior from McMurtry. She’s majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing, and she’s minoring in Art History, Museums and Cultural Heritage, and Anthropology. Andreea grew up in Houston and attended Barnard College for two years before transferring to Rice, and boy, are we lucky to hear from someone with so many different interests.
Let’s check out what a quotidian schedule looks like for Andreea:
9:30 AM- On most days I wake up around 9 or 9:30 and watch TikToks to start my day with something funny and cute. I love watching dog videos or cute babies; one of my favorite TikTokers is Maia Knight, a mom with two adorable twin babies named Violet and Scout.
10:00 AM- Before or between classes, I often do work at a restaurant or café somewhere near campus. One of my favorite spots is Seven Leaves on Richmond; their jasmine milk tea is the best.
11:00 AM- My first class is Chemistry of Art. I don’t do science, but this is the last D3 I need. It’s interesting because we get to learn about art from a different angle and talk to people immersed in the art world, like specialists from the The Museum of Fine Arts. At the same time, it’s kind of academically painful because I haven’t taken chemistry since high school, and I just got my first ever problem-set of college. Here’s me working on it.
12:30 PM- I don’t have a Rice meal plan, but if I do eat on campus, I usually grab something at Brochstein Pavilion. As a section editor for R2: The Rice Review, part of my job is to closely read submissions and help our undergrad members pick which ones we’d like to publish, so I read those during lunch.
2:30 PM- One of my favorite classes is Advanced Fiction Writing with Professor Amber Dermont. We work on a lot of short fiction stories, and right now I’m writing a semi-apocalyptic story that explores the interactions between family relationships and environmental collapse.
4:00 PM- Once a week I have a 3-hour seminar meeting, often here in Herring Hall. All senior English majors take the 2-semester Senior Seminar and Research Workshop in which we work on a huge final project. My project is an auto-fiction novel about a college student in New York whose family is from Romania; she spends a lot of time working through feeling misplaced and separated from her family and culture. It’s a very first-gen immigrant diaspora story. I’m about 8 or 9 thousand words in, and I’m hoping to write 50 thousand by the end of the semester.
7:00 PM- Since it’s my last semester in Rice Dance Theatre, I decided to choreograph a contemporary piece to a Harry Styles song. At night you can find me working on choreo moves in my room. Everyone has a different choreo planning technique, but mine is a process of listening to song snippets over and over, coming up with moves, and writing the positioning down on paper before moving on to the next part.
8:00 PM- I live with my boyfriend, and I hang out with him a lot in the evening. We like to watch movies at night, and right now, we’re re-watching the Harry Potter movies. Popcorn it is! After that, I’ll work on more homework and then head to bed.
Come back next month for another issue of “A Day in the Life of an English Major.” Any English major who wants to be featured in an upcoming issue can let us know via the Submissions page. Until next time!