<p>What's the language program like at W&M? The challenging academics of the school are very appealing to me, but I haven't heard much about the strength of this area in particular.</p>
<p>What kind of information are you looking for? The types of classes offered? The requirements for a language major? I know we offer majors in Spanish, French, German, and I think minors in Arabic, Chinese and Russian. I'm not exactly sure though. I haven't heard that it is considerably better than any other schools but I haven't really heard that about any department. In my opinion, you come to W&M for the overall experience not a specific area of study. You're going to be taking a lot of classes outside any major you think you're going to pursue.</p>
<p>I guess I'm just looking for any kind of information you couldn't learn from a tour or the course catalog. Is the program especially strong or weak? What advice would you give someone considering becoming a language major? Any random information is helpful :)</p>
<p>Please? I'll bake you brownies.</p>
<p>I don't think the programs are especially strong or weak, but they get the job done. The classes I took seemed to require a fair amount of daily work / assignments, which I guess is probably the case for language classes most places, rather than reading assignments with nothing handed in, due to the type of class it is. They were definitely challenging. Except the last class I took (I needed 3 classes after 202 for IR), that one was still a fair amount of work, but graded much easier for some reason. Actually, I'm pretty sure the reason was the professor was new and just came from ODU, so all the work she was seeing was significantly higher quality.</p>
<p>I only took 3 language classes (and I am terrible at languages). Sorry I can't help more =/</p>
<p>No, that's very helpful! And I'm actually interested in an IR major as well. . . how is that going? </p>
<p>I'll get working on those brownies.</p>
<p>IR major is going well... maybe eventually I will master Spanish. So far it has been highly unsuccessful =P. They actually just reworked (or are in the process of reworking) the IR major, but I'm doing the old one. Basically they're increasing the Econ requirements, and increasing the "core" that everyone takes.</p>
<p>I thought I read that the old IR is now Global Studies? Is that right?</p>
<p>No, Global Studies and International Relations are separate majors. For students declaring International Relations as a major from Fall 2007 and on, they've changed some of the requirements, but it is still an International Relations major. You can find more information here:</p>
<p>hm, I don't THINK WM offers a "global studies" major in general. All of the global studies options are basically concentrated in a geographic area of the world (europe, latin america, africa, middle east, east asia, russia), so you have to choose one of those areas. I think the old IR is just still around to deal with the people who have planned everything out with the old requirements. You can't really change their major requirements halfway through their time at school. So I'm pretty sure the old IR is going to just go away after the students involved graduate.</p>