Advising

Checklists

Advising Check Lists (aka cheat sheets)

The advising checklists linked below will show you the courses you need to complete in order to fulfill the requirements of the BA in English offered by the English Department at Chico State. They are intended to help you with course planning as you move through the program, but they are no substitute for meeting with an advisor -- so please plan to meet with someone at least once a semester, preferably a few weeks before you register for your next set of classes.

All three of the English Major options share the same set of seven core courses, which makes it easy to move from one option to another if your interests or future plans change. It's very common, for instance, for students to move from, say, the Literature or Education options into English Studies because they also want a minor in Linguistics or Creative Writing, and English Studies lets them double count a lot of those courses.

English Major: Option in Literature

The Literature option in the major has, as its name suggests, an emphasis on literature and literary studies. This option in the major features coursework that will help you learn more about literary history, the major genres of literature, various critical and analytical approaches to literary study, all while giving you a solid grounding in classical, multicultural, and contemporary literature.

Advising Sheet for English: Literature Option

English Major: Option in English Education

The English Education option is designed for people who would like to become a middle school or high school English teacher. The courses in this option were selected to match up with the kinds of content that public school English teachers are expected to teach, so it includes coursework in literature, composition and rhetoric, linguistics, and creative writing, as well as an excellent capstone course that allows you to see how all of those sub-areas of English connect together. While not a requirement of any kind, you might be interested in the Minor in Secondary Language Arts, which lets you do a little bit of a deeper dive into some areas of English than you get just from the major itself.

English Major: Option in English Studies

The English Studies option in the English major is a little more complex than the others. It's kind of a "choose your own adventure" setup, where you take the core courses shared by all the options, then choose a group of 3 or 4 courses focused on a particular subset of English, and finish it off with 8 units of upper-division ENGL coursework. The cheat sheets you'll find linked below will include the one that has all the possible ways through the option, but also includes versions of the cheat sheet that are tailored to various specific routes, including some of our minors and certificates. So if you're doing English Studies and taking the General Studies focus group, you'll find that below. Same if you're going for a Creative Writing minor or a TESOL Certificate. Each of the specialized cheat sheets removes all of the other possible coursework to show you a simpler route through the major.