Is Spanish a mandatory course? What if my major doesn’t require Spanish? Do I still have to take it?
No? You can take any foreign language you are interested. Although, Spanish is becoming the most popular language in the world!
So I have my placement for Spanish tomorrow and lets say i don’t do so well on it, are they going to force me to enroll in a Spanish course or is it completely my choice?
You can enroll in Spanish or another language. If you don’t like Spanish, you can start another language. Since you already studied Spanish, another romance language such as French, Italian, or Portuguese would be the easiest for you.
Stony Brook gives you a choice : either you take two semesters at the beginning level of a language unknown to you (such as French, Italian, Portuguese, but could also be Swahili, Chinese, Russian…) Or you take classes through the intermediate semester in a language you took in high school (1-2 semesters at a higher level). Many students choose to take a new language because it’s much easier to do well in elementary levels of a language than in higher levels, unless they scored high enough to place into intermediate directly and only have one semester to take.