Okay, I am going to graduate soon but there is this one road block that is keeping me from that goal. First, a little background…
I am an accounting major and I have done very well in all of my accounting courses (above class average for every class). I want to go to grad school for an MS in accounting which I thought given my accounting/business course grades would be fine. THERE’S ONE PROBLEM THOUGH
I am doing really bad in an elementary Spanish course. ELEMENTARY Spanish. It is ridiculously hard; the entire class is taught in Spanish so half the time, I don’t even know when homework is assigned/tests are scheduled and I am not the only student having difficulty. Now that it’s so late in the semester, dropping the course would give me a “W” on my transcript. The university I am applying for is telling me that this will hurt my chances at acceptance… WHAT?!? For a SPANISH COURSE?
I get that colleges want to see us “well-rounded” (cough, they just want to keep us around longer with these gen eds to suck more money out of us, cough), but seriously? I went from a strong candidate to now my chances are not nearly as good… because of a Spanish course.
I have talked to my Spanish professor; he is one of those types that just do not give a hoot about their students, so he is useless. I have looked for tutors, but there are none offered through my university. I am scared to S/U the class (pass/fail; doesn’t affect GPA) but you need at least a C to pass; no C, no credit. If I don’t do that, I can still pass the class with like a D, but it kills my GPA. Lovely situation, huh?
What should I do? Drop the class and take it next semester (I graduate in the fall btw), or stick it through and hope for the best? Idk:(
Finding a classmate in that class is the best route to success. He or she can help you on what you didn’t understand from that day’s class, tutor you, etc. I built up mutually beneficial relationships when I was in college, say helping a classmate in accounting if he helped me in Spanish. Of course you can offer to pay as well, but I would start with people in your section of Spanish.
Well, first of all, I would not take the opinion that colleges just want to wring more money out of you. That’s true about many things colleges do, but a well-rounded liberal arts education has a rich tradition. The idea is not just to prepare you vocationally for a career but to produce educated citizens who can function and vote in a democratic society. Learning another language even at a basic level teaches you something about other cultures that speak that language, and Spanish is the second most-often spoken language in the country in which we live.
Besides, graduate programs sometimes involve taking classes that you don’t want to take and that are only tangentially related to your specific interest within the field (I had to take qualitative research classes and a class in the history of public health; I’m a quantitative research psychologist. I also had to take neuroscience and cognitive psychology when my research is in the social subfield). They don’t want students who slack and do poorly in classes they perceive as less relevant…because you never know when those classes will become relevant. (That history of public health class, for example, ended up giving me excellent context and a lens through which to study the disease I focused on in grad school - HIV. And now I use qualitative research all the time in my full-time job, and am glad I had the formal training.)
Anyway, are you failing the Spanish class, or just doing poorly? You said the university doesn’t offer tutors. Can you find your own? Maybe pair up with someone in the class who is doing well, or find a senior Spanish major who can work with you a couple hours a week (maybe in exchange for a small fee or some other compensation).