Your study of literature, writing, and English education as a major or minor is intricately tied to what you learn outside the classroom. In the English Department, we like to separate these learning experiences into three kinds: Internships, Fellowships, and "Airships", or three ways of deepening your professional, research, and international experience in English literary studies.
 
Don’t just sit there reading and writing. Talk to our department Experiential Learning advisor, Professor Charles Baraw, about how to plan to take advantage of one of the opportunities below in your sophomore, junior, or senior year, or head down Engleman Hall to the Office of International Education to apply to study abroad.

Internships

Internships are ways to show the professional world after Southern what you can do as a budding expert in writing, literature, and the arts. Two kinds of internships are ideal for English majors or minors: on-campus internships, like our English Department professional writing internship or teaching internship with a faculty member; and off-campus internships in the New Haven region’s expansive museum, library, and arts or non-profit administration community. Recent English interns have worked in copy-editing at the New Haven International Festival of Arts and Ideas, in curatorial work at the Yale Center for British Art, and in research and grant-writing at Southern's SPAR office. 

Fellowships

Fellowships are simple: they’re funding – i.e., free money – to deepen your research interests in English studies. To pursue one of these research fellowships, start developing relationships with an English faculty member who shares your interests early in your degree, and then talk to them about applying for one of  Southern's Undergraduate Research Grants, which comes with $3000 to sponsor a summer research project. Recent English awardees have studied Herman Melville and the whaling industry in Mystic, CT and the history of modern American poetry anthologies in the high school classroom. 

Airships

"Airships," or study abroad opportunities, are also simple: they’re about flying away to see, first-hand, the origins of the literature you’re studying in Europe and around the globe. We currently offer two study abroad opportunities: a summer program in Rome, where you can learn classical literature in its ancient surrounding; and fall and spring-semester study abroad opportunities at Liverpool John Moores University (Liverpool, UK), where you can study the novel or Romanticism in northern England or take the train down to London to see Shakespeare’s Globe live.