<p>LOL... Well, at least one of those 3 things is correct... I am a dad...</p>
<p>are you a young dad? you seem very young and hip and modern...........my parents are very old fashioned and conservatives........wish they were doing all the leg work for me</p>
<p>It is truly amazing to me that anyone can learn Japanese, especially memorizing the 2000 Kanji symbols that are required in order to be literate. </p>
<p>The competition once you get out of the top 12 or 15 brand-name colleges drops off exponentially. I'm sure that they would be interested in admitting somebody who will take Japanese from their professors. This brings up something else, though. Your D should be careful that the college she is planning to attend actually offers 4/5 years of Japanese language instruction. Some colleges do not offer Japanese. Since LAC's are smaller, they may be less likely to do so. I know that Whitman and Lawrence do, but that Amherst doesn't. In addition, the college may offer beginning and intermediate Japn, but not advanced. You should check each school's website. I found that the best way to do this is to find the list of departments. The Japanese courses will probably be listed under either Foreign Languages, Far Eastern Studies, or Japanese. Sometimes a college will have two FL departments with one for romance languages and another for Russian & Japanese. Look to see if they offer a major or minor in Japanese. Try to find a course list. To make it worse, courses may be in the catalog that are never actually taught so you need to find the schedule. You might also want to see what study-abroad opportunites that the college offers.</p>
<p>listen to him....he KNOWS WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT...i mean so do I, but he more experienced........i loveeeeeeeeeeeee dufusssssssssssss, he is the besssssttttttttt</p>
<p>DUFUS: Thanks so much. I have been checking out courses offered and was surprised by the LACs that didn't have Japanese listed. That's kind of why I've been looking at Whitman, Lawrence and Willamette. They all do. You brought up a very good point though. If a schools has a Japanese/Asian Studies Deaprtment or major, they are going to need kids to take those classes. Perhaps that could make a difference... Rather than, for instance, the typical English/Humanities student who would compete for spots that could be filled by numerous qualified applicants. The student pool available for Japanese has to be much much smaller.<br>
Yeah... at last, a glimmer of sunshine in the process....</p>
<p>Hey calmac.</p>
<p>Umm, I have a 92 UW GPA (3.8~? Our school is different), 2200 on SATs, 750 and 710 on SAT IIs, a few other extracurricular activities (cross country, club, tutoring, etc).</p>
<p>I'm actually hoping that my whole East-Asia-...thing will carry me, haha. Like, I know for a fact that at almost every school, an East Asian Studies Major is rather rare (at Dartmouth, someone told me they make up 20~ kids out of 2100~ juniors and seniors). So maybe just maybe some schools will accept me because of my potential major. I tried demonstrating consistent interest -- that I really like EAS and will not change my major.</p>
<p>I applied to a lot of various schools: Dartmouth (I just have an obsession, plus they have EAS), and I'm from NY so Columbia and NYU (both also have EAS/Japanese). I applied to some West Coast schools as well, such as UCB (which has a great Asian language deparment, I heard), UCLA and USC (accepted, yay!)</p>
<p>You're looking for LACs though. Middlebury I think is known as the best college for languages in the entire country. Earlham is specifically great for Japanese. It's in Indiana, and it's actually even marked in some old historical Japanese maps (it was affiliated with Japan somehow a few centures ago). </p>
<p>I was going to apply to these schools, but I'm sort of more interested in East Asian history, culture, sociology, etc. so I didn't. Still, I definitely will continue learning Japanese in college.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>omg are you serious o wow your D is just like me i've been taking japanese for 4 years and studied abroad too!! except i'm a different race though <--- just pointing out the difference ; D</p>
<p>Have the headmaster check out the study abroad programs run by Andover, Exeter and St. Pauls (as a group). Kids from other schools can go, too. The year in China requires no previous study. For other countries you have to be pretty advanced.</p>
<p>Although I do go to a school with super smart kids (over 30% to ivies and we're not talking too many cornells), we had kids from all kinds of public and private schools on our study abroad year. I was not unusual in having studied 3 languages.</p>
<p>I have seen in at least one college guide that your intended major has no effect on admissions so long as you are applying within the same college UNLESS it is an unusual major at the college for which they are trying to expand the department.</p>
<p>Agreed... But I would also think that if you're in admissions at an LAC with a smaller student base and you have a major like Japanese (or a Japanese Studies program), then you're making sure that you have enough kids to fill those slots (and, I suspect, adding a few to spare just in case). A normal major would be one thing and then I guess it shouldn't matter... but logic in this kind of situation seems to indicate that you have to make sure you can fill a program like Japanese. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but in schools outside of the majors (ala Williams, Middlebury, Pomona, etc), I think this maybe be a positive for my D even with her 3.0 gpa.
Any additional thoughts?</p>
<p>Calmac, that's what I'm thinking too. Is your daughter a junior or senior? I'll be finding out from schools within a month, so I'll tell you what happens.</p>
<p>Eddieee: She's still just a junior. She's going to be trying to test out of Japanese 4 into Japanese 5 AP... That would certainly be a plus for her. If you don't mind, keep me posted on how things turn out for you.</p>
<p>Calmac..........hows it going....................still up this late at night</p>
<p>Your daughter's situation sounds very similar to that of one of my friends. She has an avg GPA but has been studying Chinese since kindergarten. With good grades in that area and a great rec from our Chinese teacher, she has already been accepted a few places (inlcuding one likely letter without even finishing her application! :)) Having studied Chinese has also helped me in my own college application process. Although my GPA is above average, 2/3 schools I've been accepted at (Notre Dame and Colgate) have specifically mentioned Chinese as a factor in my admission. Good luck!</p>
<p>SHELLZIE: Thanks so much. That's very encouraging to hear. I spoke with the headmaster at her school about this very thing the other day and he was fairly convinced that it would really help. However, that was countered by the head of college counseling who seemed to minimize it. Perhaps that was to temper expectations - who knows. As I've written here before, I just hope learning Japanese and its various written forms is an accomplishment worth something in the admission process. It certainly is in my eyes.
BESTMILER: I have been up late your time because I'm actually in Italy at the moment, where its either morning US time or late in the evening.</p>
<p>calmac............worse comes to worse....you live in Ca....im from NY but i still knwo this......tell you d to go to a community college, and bring her gpa and transfer to Berkeley......MANY PEOPLE DO IT...worth a try</p>
<p>Just wanted to say that we really do appreciate all the heart-felt comments and suggestions. You have give us (D and myself) alot to think about.</p>
<p>Hey, Im a rising senior with almost 8 years of japanese under my belt from my school (and yes, I'm white). Having a white japanese speaker is a much bigger hook than a....hispanic french speaker? Japanese is a hard language, and the colleges know that! This could be a major hook if you remind them that it is not spoken at home, etc. also, make sure to tell your daughter to capitalize on her japanese learning "story" so that it will appear nicely on paper (and it sounds like she's doing a good job!) A big hint, tell her to claim Japanese as her potential major on her application (it's not binding!) Plenty of great schools have Japanese departments dying for students. Who knows? She could get in somewhere a million times 'better' than without that hook!</p>
<p>Thanks for the post. My daughter is actually in Japan right now on a 3 week-long study trip. This is the second summer that she has gone over there to take classes, live with a family and learn the culture. Her GPA actually shot up to a 3.7 this past semester with an A in Japanese 3. Her overall GPA is still fairly weak, hovering around a 3.1 or so but the trend is positive (and it's not like she's looking to get into an ivy). I will let her know your thoughts about the emphasis on her Japanese studies, because I can't imagine that it won't be overwhelmingly positive (as well as note in her applications that she might major in Japanese).<br>
Thanks again.</p>
<p>I'm also very interested in Japanese and am looking to major in it (or EAS) in college. I would like to emphasize it in my app, but I'm not sure how much it will help me. The school I go to has absolutely no resources for Japanese (the only languages offered are Spanish, French, and German), so I've been teaching myself since I was 12. I took the highest class offered at the local community college for a semester (second semester of intermediate Japanese) when I was a freshman, but didn't really learn anything from it because I already knew all the material. But besides that class (which I can't even prove I took because my registration got majorly screwed up and the college doesn't have me on record) a 780 on the Japanese SAT II, and my participation in a speech contest run by the Consulate General of Japan at Chicago (I was selected as one of ten participants for my category from entries throughout the Midwest and won an award), I don't have much else to show. I would've loved to do a homestay in Japan or take a class at the University of Chicago during the summer, but time and money was a major limiting factor. (Most homestay and summer college programs I found lasted close to or more than a month and cost more than $5000, which really was not feasible.) </p>
<p>So I guess I'm wondering if it's even worth it to try to emphasize this at all, since I haven't done any homestay programs and won't be able to get recommendations from anyone (unless I try to track down my teacher from the community college, but I haven't kept in contact with her and don't even know if she still teaches there). Also, I'm Chinese, so would my self-studying it not look so impressive because of that? (Chinese and Japanese aren't similar at all except for the kanji, but it'd look more impressive if a white person did it, right?) My Japanese self-study has been a huge part of my life for the past few years though, and I really want to try to emphasize it even though I don't have very much to show for it. Does anyone have any advice as to what I could possibly do to turn this into more of a hook? (If it would even count as a hook, that is.)</p>