Hi, I’m a current high school student who has an immense interest in international affairs and going into a educational and career areas revolving around international relations. I would ideally love to work for the government, particularly in the State Department (i.e. Foreign Service) or CIA and international-intelligence oriented jobs. I also have an extremely large passion for foreign languages and would like to get some tips on what to do if I am planning on becoming multilingual. Would it be better to specialize in an area of the world (currently Eastern Asia is of great interest to me) and learn the languages spoken there, or would it be better to have a more international assortment of languages at my disposal?
At the current moment in time I’m taking French, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese at school. Would it be better to continue with these languages that have a more diverse outreach once I go on to college and focus on these three, or would it be better to focus in on Japanese and Korea in order to become more specialized in a certain area of the world?
I’m also interested, if I were to go and focus instead of an area of the world, more on the international outreach of the languages, to begin learning Russian since I am already quite proficient in Mandarin and Spanish due to family and heritage reasons.
Thanks for your advice in advance