I want to quickly thank the faculty and staff of the English Department for this opportunity to speak to you this rainy Wednesday morning. It wasn't very long ago that I was sitting down on the other side of this podium listening to some speaker on an English Day. So I want to thank you, as well, for your indulgence and patience. I promise not to tax them too much. It has been about eight years since I graduated with an MA in English from SIU-C, and a lot has happened to me both personally and professionally. A lot of change. A lot of growth. I have had good fortune in my career. It has opened many doors for me, given me a chance to travel the world, to manage large groups of people, and to effect a change in the people I work with and the business direction of the company for which I work. Much of this success I owe to the lessons I learned here in the SIU-C English Department.

If an English Day speaker had asked me eight years ago to try to guess where I would be in my career in 1999, I am sure I would not have had a clue. After all, I didn't study English to become a marketing manager. I studied English because of a love and passion for language, for a desire to learn the magic art of communication. Period. In a word, I followed my heart. I did what I enjoyed. And that has certainly made all the difference.

I understand that today we are breaking with tradition. In the past, the department has asked Ph.D. graduates to be the English Day speaker – meaning educators talking to other educators and students. This year, there was a desire to have a speaker address future professional career opportunities (and thus potential future career success) in fields other than the most often traveled career path of English majors – teaching. I am honored to be that speaker.

As an English major out and about among accountants, lawyers, MBA's, and the like, I have come to learn the true value and universal appeal of the basic skills we learn as English majors. With all due respect to our colleagues in the professional fields of specialized skills – the accountants and lawyers – there is much to be said for the advantages of being a generalist in a specialized world.

In my career, crisp writing and clear, effective communication is an essential element of success. Whenever a project fails, it inevitably fails because of some flaw in presentation, some flaw in the spoken or written word. In my corporate duties, I spend an inordinate amount of time writing reports, drafting speeches, crafting articles, and designing strategy papers – employing valuable lessons in persuasive and descriptive writing. I also spend a considerable amount of time in long, grueling strategy meetings arguing points of business or fact and relying on lessons in literature and rhetoric in how to structure arguments, how to create a context, how to orchestrate arguments around a larger whole, and how to drive points home and succeed in whatever project for which I am engaged.

This is something that my colleagues in the specialized fields often have difficulty in achieving. They can easily manipulate ones and zeros. After all, the only difference between $1, $100,000, and $1,000,000 is a bunch of zeros. The manipulation of these numbers is a pretty straightforward task. But to be able to interpret the numbers (to add value and meaning to them) is a skill that often eludes them. I know a lot of people in my career who can count the dots; I know very few of them that are able to connect them, to generate the big picture.

The manipulation of ones and zeros is an easy trick – a product of rote memory. It can be taught and it can be learned. But with the mysterious ways in which the brain is hot-wired to make difficult intellectual leaps, analytical conclusions, and leaps of faith into big picture "stuff" – this is much harder to learn, let alone to teach. Yet these are the very same skills with which English majors find themselves practicing on a daily basis.

If I asked an accountant at the bank to give me a financial overview of the company, I would inevitably get a laundry list of facts and figures, and a general statement of whether or not we are doing well. This is like an English major simply turning in his or her copy of Catcher In The Rye as a book report, and tossing it on the table as if to say: "Boom. Here it is. In black and white. Read it for yourself." Well, as English majors, we all know there are multiple ways – multiple approaches – to interpreting a text. What an instructor wants to know from you is your perspective on that text, the meaning you are able to derive from it. The same is true in business, only the text often consists of numbers instead of words. And we as English majors are well equipped to provide the meaning.

My first job at the bank was as a portfolio analyst. The job of a portfolio analyst is to pour through hundreds of pages of pension fund statements. Day after day. Week after week. And month after month. The analyst will watch every transaction in the account to track every single penny. Now, these are corporate pension accounts, so they have billions of dollars of assets and hundreds of transactions a month. While some investments go up, unfortunately some tend to go down. It is the analyst's job to make sure that when $100 million disappears from an account, it does so because the market has changed and not because someone has a finger in the honey pot.

This is minutiae detail work. I remember once spending five hours trying to find a lost quarter in a pension account that had over $1 billion in assets. Five hours. It is the type of thing that makes you want to reach in your wallet, take out a quarter, tape it to the statement and say, "Here. I am done!" But you can't.

I can't imagine any business major aspiring to this kind of a job, let alone an English major. But there I was, drudging away with my ten key adding up all these numbers and making sure every penny was accounted for. But what I soon noticed was that dramatic changes in the accounts were usually precipitated by some external event – say, a dramatic change in oil prices because of some political turmoil somewhere in the world. But the analysts were oblivious to this. They spent their whole day drudging through these reports in their Dilbert cubicles never once having time to notice the outside world.

So I formed trend analysis groups – groups like graduate level seminars in modern American fiction. I assigned economic sectors to different groups. The groups would get together over lunch. I would orchestrate discussions about the meaning of the events and what they might do to the accounts we managed. Before long, our group could anticipate the areas of their accounts that would have problems simply by monitoring the news on the morning ride in. Our jobs became easier. But more importantly, they became more fun and were connected with the outside world. The big picture.

The accountant's approach was to attack the statements with a calculator and add up columns and rows until the place that didn't follow the rules made itself known. My approach was to apply analysis and deductive reasoning on the front end to the job. Different approaches; sure. But also dramatically different results – both personally and professionally.

In my mind, the lesson here is simple. The skills we learn as English majors are valuable whether the intent is to follow a career path toward teaching, or the intent is to go into the private sector and pursue a career in advertising, marketing, public relations, publishing, government, or any one of a host of fields that speak to the skills you will have learned here at SIU. If you choose to take a path outside of the academic world of teaching, you will bring to the table a skill set that will prepare you for success.

But there are trade-offs. There are consequences for the choices we make in life. In economic theory, these consequences are called "opportunity costs." When we choose one course of action over another, the cost of choosing that course is our inability to pursue other courses. If I become a teacher, I can not become a marketing manager; if I become a marketing manager, I can not become a teacher. But we are willing to pay these costs because of the benefits we receive in exchange for our choices – both personally and professionally.

Ultimately, for your career choice, you should be guided by the benefit results that mean the most for you. If you become a teacher, you should do so because of your love for the subject and the desire to effect a change in the lives of your students – not just because teaching is a job and offers a paycheck. If you pursue a career outside of teaching, do so because of the opportunity and benefits realized from being able to succeed using the same skills as a teacher, only applied in a different environment. Whatever your choice, rest assured that you will be well prepared by what you learn as English majors in this department. And you will experience both rich and rewarding lives.

Thank you and good luck.