Chinese Language Opportunities at Boarding School

Prep School Admissions
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<p>Interesting you make the comparison to Japanese in 80s. I was actually thinking exactly the same thing and in fact might add (althougth to a slightly lesser degree) Russian in the mid 90s. If you enjoy it - great. Will it hurt? Of course not. Is it necessary to succeed in business in the coming decades? I honestly don't think so.</p>

<p>I will disagree though regarding programing languages, at least with respect to trading roles in the Wall Street and hedge fund worlds. Math and engineering grads with programming ability are some of the most highly sought after candidates. Definitely don't have to be hardcore coders, but not having some ability in that area is a strike against candidates for most trading type roles. True they aren't the programming languages that were taught 10 or 20 years ago and that may be a skill that you will always have to keep refreshing based on new developments in languages and codes.</p>

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<p>There are lots of "reasons" to select one foreign language over another.</p>

<p>Yeah, Chinese seems to be the "fad" language of the decade. </p>

<p>I think a few basic principles can be said about choosing a foreign language:</p>

<p>1) You can never go wrong with Latin. It was never "in" fashion and never out of style. It will help you with your vocabulary more than any other language.</p>

<p>2) If you have a particular attraction to a culture, then by all means take the language that goes with it. A motivated student always does better and enjoys it more.</p>

<p>3) If you have trouble pronouncing certain sounds, then you may want to avoid languages that use that sound prominently. If you can't roll "r's" at the front of your mouth (I can't), Spanish is a bad idea. If you can't roll them in your throat, German is a bad idea.</p>

<p>4) If you have a field of interest that is likely to be heavily populated by a certain culture, take the language. For example, if you are a classical musician, you are most likely to benefit from German, Italian, French, and Russian.</p>

<p>5) If your dream job involves working with the common man (think Social Work or Psychology) I would advise taking Spanish, as the Latino population is only growing and you will be able to better serve more people.</p>

<p>6) If you want to work in a foreign intellegence agency (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.) , the easiest way in is by knowing Arabic, although Chinese is not a bad bet these days, and Russian is always welcome.</p>

<p>If you want to learn a computer language, you must be nuts, as they become obsolete before the ink dries on the book (LOL). That's why I do database administration. Data is forever. Database engines have about 10x the half-life of application programming languages. D'yer, you date yourself well.</p>

<p>However, being able to use common off-the-shelf software to do professional quality work is always a valuable skill. A boss always appreciate someone who can take information (data, or graphic) and make a pretty picture while answering their question.</p>

<p>I would imagine that someone who could effectively use statistical software (SAS, SPSS, etc.) would be a better candidate for a Wall Street job. Nothing like being able to make sense out of raw numbers.</p>

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<p>Exeter has a great language offerings. Probably the best i've seen. does anyone know what schools offer italian besides exeter?</p>

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<p>Hackley offers italian.</p>

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<p>What language do you think'd be best for math/science/engineering?
Programming languages excluded, im trying to decide between Chinese and Russian at Andover.</p>

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<p>
[QUOTE]
I would imagine that someone who could effectively use statistical software (SAS, SPSS, etc.) would be a better candidate for a Wall Street job. Nothing like being able to make sense out of raw numbers.

[/QUOTE]
</p>

<p>You are absolutely right that a lot of what drives Wall Street is number crunching and statistics, but honestly I have never seen one of those off the shelf products used in that context. I think almost everybody I have seen uses proprietary systems where their data is stored in a RDBMS with custom queries written against that database in something like SQL. Most Wall Street banks or hedge funds will have dedicated groups of developers that create and maintain their systems, but for the "sexy" trading desk jobs candidates with familiarity with langugages like SQL and VB/VBA (for Excel based models), as well as understanding of the Linux architecture and related programming languages are going to have a real advantage. In my opinion, the most common off the shelf software in the Wall Street setting - Excel, by far.</p>

<p>Regarding spoken languages in the business world, it may seem like the ugly American thing to say, but most high profile finance business gets done in English. I have been involved with plenty of roadshows for transactions where over the course of two weeks I met with speakers of at a minimum French, German, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English. Yes, you may end up doing something specialized where a particular language could be very valuable, but when you are in high school you have no idea what you will ultimately end up doing. That language that may end up being valuable could be Chinese. It could also be Bulgarian. Or Tagalog. Or who knows what. At this point in your life, take whatever interests you.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
goaliedad, we don't disagree on much but on this one we do. You are absolutely right that a lot of what drives Wall Street is number crunching and statistics, but honestly I have never seen one of those off the shelf products used in that context. I think almost everybody I have seen uses proprietary systems where their data is stored in a RDBMS with custom queries written against that database in something like SQL. Most Wall Street banks or hedge funds will have dedicated groups of developers that create and maintain their systems, but for the "sexy" trading desk jobs candidates with familiarity with langugages like SQL and VB/VBA (for Excel based models), as well as understanding of the Linux architecture and related programming languages are going to have a real advantage. In my opinion, the most common off the shelf software in the Wall Street setting - Excel, by far.

[/quote]

Gee, I guess that on a high level (where the deals are done) I guess there isn't as much fancy modeling as I thought there would be. Kinda disappointing to me. That is just my bias, though. I come from an operations management background where we appreciate skills whereby a person can pick out trends from volumes of data using statitical evaluation - not an easy thing to write on your own in Excel. </p>

<p>When I plied my database skills in retail, we would set up mining databases (of detailed sales transactions), but SQL was only used to pull the general parameters of the data involved. If you wanted to know how many garmants of which size and which color to send to which store, you generally pulled your category of data out and then used a more sophisticated tool to see which store was trending towards which groupings of merchandise.</p>

<p>Perhaps the data available for trading doesn't lend itself to this type of analysis, so spreadsheets are the better tool. That is more up your alley.</p>

<p>I will agree though that you cannot go wrong knowing how to do fancy things with a spreadsheet. It has more than once been the tool of choice for me.</p>

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<p>It does depend on what kind of trading you are doing. There are definitely some times of statistical arb that are very much backward looking and all about teasing out trends. Those strategies tend to be based in the equities markets where the market is more efficient and there is massive amounts of historical data. There is a lot though that is very forward looking using pre-defined sets of assumptions. For a lot of path dependent means of analyzing trades Excel modified with VBA can be pretty powerful. Or forward looking stuff can be analyzed using Monte Carlo type analysis where it may be more about the raw computing power you need rather than the complexity of the actual model.</p>

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<p>For poster interested in Italian, that language is not generally taught as a "primary" second language in this country. At Exeter, and probably elsewhere, it is offered to students who have already fulfilled language requirement, at a quicker pace. If you want to learn Italian, study French, Spanish, or Latin, and then pick Italian up later, even in college. A great thing to do is a program in Italy for semester or summer, especially for speaking the language. Reading will come easier.</p>

<p>Yes, fad or not, Chinese is now something a good-sized strong school is expected to offer. No, Groton does not offer it yet. But remember that Groton is one of the few schools that still requires classical and modern language, and it is a small school. More choices are much harder for smaller schools to schedule. It is much harder to offer Chinese, than say more English electives, because that Chinese teacher probably won't be teaching anything else, and if you start a language you have to commit to it for students taking it. </p>

<p>What I find funny is that where we live the handy language for everyday life is Portuguese more than Spanish, but the schools don't teach it.</p>

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<p>I speak portuguese!!! :)</p>

<p>Where do you live, Inquiring mind? (I'm not stalking you haha- just curious b/c of what you said about how portuguese is more handy there)</p>

<p>It would be nice if schools offered portuguese. The problem with it, though, is that the pronunciation seems to be really tough for those who weren't born speaking it. I've heard people who've learned it later in life speak it and their accents are atrocious. Like, really. It's kind of discouraging as a high school student when you're learning a language and can't get like any of the pronunciation down...</p>

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<p>I'll second those who point out that Chinese is the current 'in' language, and who caution that this is not a good enough reason to learn it. It is easy to underestimate how hard it is to actually reach competence in Mandarin, and many of even the very best high schools do only a mediocre job teaching it. The same thing happened (and continues to happen) with Japanese. I know students who took three years of Japanese at top-tier schools and ended up in Japanese 1 when they got to college.</p>

<p>I happen to speak Japanese better than my other "second" languages, and I'm glad I put in the work to get to the level I'm at. But it wasn't easy, and it would NOT have been worth it if I had started it because I thought it would prepare me for a career in i-banking. Even if Japan was still the hot economy it was it wouldn't have been worth it--economic elites speak English, and in any case there are plenty of translators. In the end, it was only a sustained interest in the country and its culture that made it worthwhile.</p>

<p>That said, for current high school students who are genuinely interested in the language, Beloit College offers summer intensive courses in Chinese for high school students. They offer full tuition scholarships (around $5000) for exceptional high school students, and as far as I know you don't need any previous experience with the language. Here is the URL from the announcement: <a href="http://www.summerlanguages.com/startalk%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.summerlanguages.com/startalk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>I want to bump up this question from Anti-Thesis because I'm curious about the answer people might have.</p>

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<p>This got lost amid the conversation about programming languages and Wall Street. Does anyone familiar with math professions or engineering or scientific fields, such as chemical engineering, have an opinion as to what language would be most beneficial? I would think that it would help to attend an international math symposium and speak the prevailing language or, if it's English, then the native tongue of most of the attendees. And that might very well be Chinese, no?</p>

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<p>The international language around the world for business is English. In fact I've met many Chinese who speak better English than many English speaking people. The Far East is building incredibly fast, especially China. Mainland Chinese are all over Western Europe and the U.S. giving out lucrative contracts of all types. They are not going to Russia. Those with the money make the rules and if anybody is about to lead economically it will be China. Take Chinese.</p>

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<p>Berkshire has Chinese.</p>