Any STEM majors here who feel that they have learned a sufficient

>>10020366
In the same boat OP. Bumping for interest. From what I gather, you'll never attain academic proficiency in philosophy but you'll be able to understand enough for it to have a positive impact on your life regardless.

>>10020366
Have you ever met any lit majors who knew a thing outside of their area of study? What dya think you dip

>>10020366
Similar situation. I'm going into medicine.

>>10020378
I don't know many people in general, I am a math major

During my general ed classes I felt like I was a lot more well-read then most people in the class studying lit and philosophy. Its really hard to tell because you don't actually read that much in the average college course and you don't learn anything you can't find in an online lecture or library. STEM subjects are a lot more difficult to learn as an autodidact because they rely heavily on practical experience and sound instruction (my opinion).

am chem major btw. What are you studying?

>>10020382
There's certainly no law against having friends in the humanities, nor against reading serious lit on the side if you have it in you; maybe you can even get some of those folks to appreciate the philosophical beauty of math/physics/CS/whatever.
t. math BA grad halfway through Proust

>>10020366
There are plenty of great authors who never even went to university. You don't need an English degree to be a good writer.

>>10020368
>>10020381
>>10020388 (I'm a math major)
I'm glad to hear that others are in a similar boat. Out of the few literature courses I have taken (grand total: 1) I do always seem surprised how little the students know, not to say stupid, but just not knowing a whole lot about their field of study. As far as philosophy goes, at my school the students are not merely ignorant but also dumb. It is quite startling how bad they are at thinking philosophically. I guess I don't want to conflate the instruction with the students though. I live with a tacit assumption that the professors are fine, but it is the students who are not doing their end of the work. This is why I am afraid that I won't know everything that one should know. But >>10020417 pointed out something that for some reason I always repress even though I know it to be true. It probably has something to do with the culture being ultra high strung about specialization and doing everything while you are young. I need to get better at resisting this component probably.

>>10020573
I actually made a list of authors who dropped out, never attended university, or didn't major in literature. There are far more who did not study literature in university. Some big names that come to mind include Shakespeare, Whitman,Twain, Hemingway... also, the discipline of "English literature" didn't really form until the 20th century. Classics and theology were the chief subjects for a long time.

Nonetheless, it is important if you do want to be a writer to read widely in the Anglo-American canon if that's your native language. Foreign literature is a bit of a meme... you see Tolstoyevsky (both are uni dropouts btw) threads on here every day, but it's far more important to read Shakespeare, especially if your native tongue is Engish.

On the other hand, there are some writers who were not very intellectual but managed to do all right. I'm thinking of Homer, Shakespeare, and Whitman. I'm pretty sure Whitman probably read Shakespeare and the Bible and little else, yet with just those two influences he managed to make free verse the dominant style for poetry. As for Shakespeare, it's said that he probably owned only 10 or 20 books in his entire lifetime.

It really just depends on what kind of person you are and what and how you plan on writing. Some wankery like Gravity's Rainbow probably couldn't have been done without an English degree. Plenty of great works have been done without one.

>>10020366
Dostoevsky was no English major

>>10021065
What makes GR wankery

>>10020366
>philosophy
You'll never learn it on your own, at least not nearly as much as you'd learn in university. There's no such thing as a self-taught philosopher.

>literature
You don't need a degree to write, you just need to read and write. Not to say it wouldn't help to study it, but generally the career path for a language or literature major is to be an academic, not a professional writer.

However, if it really is your aspiration to write, I don't see why you wouldn't dedicate your all to it. You'll still need a day job regardless, wouldn't be better if your job was teaching literature or otherwise involving to it, as opposed to something completely unrelated? And isn't it more fulfilling to study what is, or should be (if you're a writer), your utmost passion?