So my dad spent his undergrad at Carnegie Mellon for CS and went to Wharton for grad school. He’s a STEM sort of guy and his mindset regarding college has always been vocational. As for me, my heart (not to mention skillset) has always been in the Humanities, particularly the study of language. For the past year (I’m about to be a senior in HS) I’ve expressed that I want to study Linguistics in college, if for no other reason than my high school resume only points me toward the Humanities anyway. My dad never hesitates to interrogate me about how I’ll find a job or do anything useful with such a degree, and time and time again I’ve come at him with evidence that the study of language is not pointless in the Information Age. However, since I’m rather aware of my overly-optimistic tendencies, I figured I’d put my ideas to the test on the most honest college forum around.
So what are your thoughts? Is a Linguistics Major a waste of time in this day and age? Should I invest my time in something more practical? I’m not looking for objective answers here, just people’s thoughts and opinions. If you want any extra information I’d be happy to oblige, and thank you for your consideration 
I worked in Russia and the CIS for quite a while. When most of the foreign companies were establishing operations there, translators were in high demand. That was typically short-term though as quickly we found folks with the technical skills we needed that also spoke English.
It seems that being able to speak multiple languages is an asset but only as a supplement to other skills you may have. with the ability to travel so freely these days, will you not always be running up folks that speak many languages fluently as parents are from X but moved to the US/UK etc when the kid was small so they are bi-lingual? Not to mention AI but that seems to still be developing a bit slowly. Perhaps you should look at requirements to work for the government, etc. Good luck!!
Linguistics is very useful! Especially if you minor or take a few classes in CS, since computational linguistics is a big thing right now in the tech industry. Some computational linguistics teams are actually made up of people that are linguists, software developers/AI people, and those that do both.
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Linguistics is not about being a translator but about the study of language. In 2017, some of the best linguistics work is being done by computational linguists from computer science or cognitive science departments. The marriage of computer science and linguistics is natural and the incorporation of a probabilistic viewpoint pushed by the computational folks is pointing toward linguistic theories that can be validated by data.
This little cartoon is meant as an exaggerated joke, but perhaps can give you some ideas.
http://specgram.com/choose/
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Thanks for that link, @ClassicRockerDad. My D18 is eyeing Linguistics/CogSci/Computational Linguistics.
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It’s true that some people with science majors cannot imagine the utility of humanities and social sciences majors because they lack imagination about where those majors can be applied…or even the ability to simply look around them at all the people who are working alongside them and majored in a non-STEM field (including some of the people they probably assume majored in a STEM field). I work with a linguistics major right now who is a program manager at my very large tech company, along with scores of other humanities and social sciences majors. We’re everywhere, we do all kinds of jobs, and on average we make middle-class salaries and live comfortable lifestyles.
If your dad’s a STEM guy no doubt he’s heard of all of the systems that now allow you to talk to them - Siri, Cortana, Echo, Google Assistant, Bixby. Sure, there’s some developer programming them, but who does he think is teaching the bot to understand how humans talk - in multiple different languages, with different accents and cadences?
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