I’m a native Korean and lived in Korea for most of my life but right now I’m in the United States. I took an East Asian Studies course my freshman year and really liked it so I was thinking of putting it as my intended major.
I know that East Asia isn’t only composed Korea (there’s also Japan and China), but would colleges look unfavorably on an East Asian saying they want to major in East Asian Studies as opposed to a foreigner (not East Asian)?
The reason I’m worried about this is because I’m already fluent in Korean and know the basics of Korean history. Would colleges think that I just want to major in a subject that I’m familiar with and therefore not challenge myself?
Also, if the foreign language that I took all throughout high school was Spanish (not an East Asian language), would they also see my transcript and think that it’s sort of weird that I want to study East Asian languages and history when I took a language that wasn’t related to it (Spanish)?
Lots of colleges offer foreign languages and literatures that are not the ones commonly found in US high schools, so it is not that unusual for a student who studied a common US high school foreign language like Spanish or French to be interested in studying some other foreign language.