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As someone who has been on both sides of the table, there are a few interesting expectations from literary studies that I have encountered as a student and as a teacher in the journey so far.
There are some people who expect us to have read all possible texts (novels and poems) that have been classified under ‘literary’ studies; to recite poems verbatim, to quote exact words, to define ‘story’, ‘plot’, ‘character’, as if literature is all about rote learning. As I look back, I realize I haven’t read even half of those ‘classic’ texts. I do not remember my own poems, forget memorizing the poems of Keats or Shelly or Whitman. Seniors from engineering disciplines at IIT tested me by asking if I had read a certain ‘remote’ ‘less-known’ Kant, Wittgenstein, Tagore, Dickens, Hardy. They could actually cite the exact page numbers. I usually had a puzzled look as a response. I have not been an avid reader, just been a focused reader.
There are another set of people who expect that students of literature can write love-letters and are ‘romantic’ by default. As I reflect back, I feel love and romance was not my profession, literature was. I perceived an “ideal” world that came alive only in my imagination and only through the characters in the texts that I read. I have written just one love-letter in life and that was during a love-letter writing competition of PG cult; but never won the prize. 🙂 I realized that there were far more intense love-letter writers from other disciplines than I could ever be.
There are a third set of people who expect us to be experts in CV analysis or to be great editors. As I read through some of my own writings, I realize how much I needed a CV analyst and a soft-skills trainer to train me in the art of marketing my work. So, what do students of literature actually do? If there are better ‘thinkers’, ‘writers’, ‘analysts’, ‘reviewers’, ‘soft-skills’ trainers or even ‘lovers’ than us, what have we been doing so far? A little something of everything or ‘much ado about nothing’? Living under borrowed titles? Or living as parasites/adjuncts in a robust tree of an institution? I hope the profession of literary experts is not getting limited to being bad critics or worse reviewers? I hope we are not an endangered profession like the clock-keepers or ‘Ghadi-babus’ of the 19th century, who dwindled away with the turn of the century after the invention of automatic clocks?
Well, I am in quest for the answers myself. Help me out, if you can.
Until then…. This piece of writing is in the ‘confessional’ literary vein.
Iris 
Anne, you may delete this after reading. Shooting into your personal email wouldn’t be decent. Hence this note.
Presence of 4 major planets i.e Mars, Rahu, Saturn and Jupiter in your 10th house of Profession will lead your inner self to toy with the idea of pursuing multiple callings by just skimming the surface of each of them. Its not that you are not capable of getting deep into any of them. Its just that you wouldn’t want to sacrifice one learning at the cost of completely ignoring the other(s). While Mars (Mangal) will motivate you to become a crusader for all evils affecting society at large, Jupiter will tend to make a worthy advisor/counselor of you. Rahu will exhort your passion to learn and practice modern callings including technology and would make your outlook expansive in nature, Saturn would tend to make you an astute leader of a large group of people. This combination also makes for a shrewd & successful business persona. This also gives great investigative propensity to the native. While Mercury, the planet of communication remains hidden in the 8th, it occupies its own house with the result that your innate capacity to author BS novels would be hindered due to lack of consistency in pursuing the project till the very end. But, having said this, a minor window of opportunity presents itself during 1916-17 for a successful book release, while 2022-24 will surely see a bigger fame for similar reasons.
How do you know so much about me including my birth day, year, and birth time? Your prediction seems to tell that I will be a jack of all trades.