Congratulations, high school seniors! You have graduated! You now have two months to relax before you pack your bags, move to college, and … choose your major!

Whoa, wait! You say that you’ve already chosen your major? Well, maybe. I’m sure you wrote something in your Common App essay about your plans. Maybe you liked your physics class and listed “Physics Major!” as your college dream. (Reader: I did this…complete with an exclamation point!) Or maybe you thought “$$$$$$” and gushed about your passion for business.

But it’s now six months later, and for some of you, things have changed. Maybe your physics “Yeah” turned to “Meh” after the AP exam. Maybe your older sibling shared their Principles of Financial Accounting syllabus, and your blood ran cold. Or maybe you plan to keep your options open. For the undecided, semi-decided, and even the firmly decided, I am here to make the case for English.

Why English?

Let’s start with the simple fact that four years of challenging reading, careful analyzing, and copious writing will train you for just about anything after college. Within 10 years of graduating, English majors earn as much money as (and enjoy higher career satisfaction than) their STEM counterparts. And no, these are not studies done by English majors but by (possibly envious?) social scientists. English majors also go into wildly diverse fields; they become lawyers, politicians, doctors, computer programmers, and yes, also teachers and journalists. Google “Famous English Majors” and you’ll find (among others) Steven Spielberg, Barbara Walters, Sting, and Mitt Romney. You also see that astronaut Sally Ride got her bachelor’s degree in English, as did Harold Varmus, whose Nobel Prize was for medicine.

Ok fine. Those are famous people. If you want a more down-to-earth example, I’ll point you in the direction of a guy named Jeff, who happens to be my spouse, who also happens to have his BA and MA in, yes, English. After earning these degrees, Jeff became a computer programmer. In fact, he’s such a good computer programmer that recruiters call him. Constantly. Why is Jeff so good at his job? Because in college and graduate school he learned to read carefully and write well, and he used this training to become an amazing coder.

A degree in English will also help you connect to other people. And no, I don’t just mean that it qualifies you to join a book club, although you might consider this, even if you don’t major in English. I mean that your skill with language will help you forge connections to others. In a world where relationships are mediated through technology, better writers (and thinkers) will have the upper hand. This is why English majors write the sassiest profiles on Match.com. And then, once they are on a date, they will have interesting things to say about the movies, books, and music they enjoy.

But finally, and most importantly, an English major is your best defense against AI. As you’ve probably noticed, Generative AI is upending our world. It promises to make some jobs as extinct as the Oxford Dodo and to reshape others beyond recognition. But as anyone who has ever dabbled with ChatGPT can tell you, using AI is not easy. It takes precision and finesse. If I want AI to rewrite this opinion piece in the gonzo journalism style of Hunter S. Thompson, then I will need to know the gonzo journalism style of Hunter S. Thompson. And that’s just a low-lying-fruit-type example. Good prompts for AI generation require clarity and specificity. Or, put more colorfully, garbage in, garbage out.

Who will be the authors of these good, non-garbage prompts? Yup, that’s right. And ha! You’ve probably already studied enough English to know that I don’t need to answer a rhetorical question.

With colleges now encouraging people to explore many topics, and with students often having two majors, or one major and one minor, there is in fact no good reason not to make English a field of study. You’ll be happier and better for it. Will you encounter barista jokes? Yes. Will your engineering roommate mock you? Perhaps. But if they do, there’s no need to get angry. You could of course reply with some salty words of Middle English provenance. You could also tear out your hair and cry “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

But perhaps instead, one day while they are out, you might slip a poem by Emily Dickinson, by Langston Hughes, or by Natalie Diaz on to their desk. After all, the better part of valor is discretion. And also, English is a big table with many nourishing dishes, and we invite all to share the feast.

Jenny Adams is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.