<p>As a girl with parents who did not attend college, I wanted to seek some advice pertaining to double minoring alongside a major. </p>
<p>I already know that I want to major in some field of history, but I also want to minor in two languages, French and Russian. </p>
<p>Though I've already taken French for some years at the high school level, I've never learned any Russian nor do I speak any Eastern-European languages. Is it possible to take complete beginner level courses in languages at most colleges without having started in high school? </p>
<p>Would the workload with this be manageable? Especially considering the fact that I will probably attend a liberal arts school and they often require that you take certain other courses outside of your major, such as calculus?</p>
<p>It certainly is possible to start a language fresh in college, especially with a language like Russian that is taught at very few high schools (it used to be more, but with the implosion of the Russian empire aka the USSR there’s less demand for it, both at the high school and college levels). You’ll need to be very selective in the LAC you pick - fewer and fewer offer Russian, and at most of those that do the Russian faculty consists of one person - so the selection of courses is going to be limited and it may not be possible to minor in it.</p>
<p>With a double minor of any kind - especially including one in a language you’re starting off in as a freshman - your schedule is going to be very full and will limit the free electives you can take. You might need to do some summer work or plan to take an extra semester or year to finish. If you have some AP credits, that would help.</p>
<p>My D just completed a year of Russian in her high school (very unusual place!), along with three years of German, and one of her college selection criteria was the ability to continue the Russian. That significantly reduced the number of possible schools (which in a way was a blessing). She is planning to double-minor in German and Russian, but probably with a major in psychology or biology. It’s likely it will take her five years, since she wants to spend a semester each at both a German and Russian university.</p>
<p>At one school, where my daughter visited and sat in on a Russian class, the teacher told her that in her 15 years at the university, she had only had three freshmen come in with prior coursework in Russian.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Don’t get hung up on double-minoring. If you know French and Russian, that will be on your resume. Knowing those languages may help you get a job, or get into graduate school. Minoring in them means nothing. That isn’t to say you should avoid minoring in either, but you shouldn’t go out of your way to meet the requirements.</p></li>
<li><p>Of course you can start from 0 and learn a language in college. Most high schools don’t teach Russian, or Farsi, Sanskrit, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish . . . Colleges DO try to teach those languages, and many others.</p></li>
<li><p>But it DOES take a lot of time, because colleges don’t dribble it out like high school classes. A two-semester college introductory language course should be the equivalent of four years (or more) of high school language study. People do take two languages, especially where, as with you, they are advanced in one of them, but it’s a major time commitment. It won’t be impossible to do that and to complete whatever general education requirements you have, but you WILL have to make choices. No taking the pre-med requirements just in case!</p></li>
</ol>
<p>French and Russian was a popular combination among language majors when I was in school, but like annasdad pointed out, Russian is being offered at fewer and fewer schools. My alma mater no longer offers Russian. I took five trimesters of Russian with no prior knowledge of the language. My last class was a Russian literature course entirely in Russian. I loved the language and only stopped taking Russian classes because of scheduling conflicts with my major.</p>
<p>Agree completely with JHS, there’s no need to get a minor in a language, what counts is how well you can speak it. While you absolutely can start in a language to which you have had no exposure, as a bit of a warning you may find that a fair number in your class may be a step ahead of you having had some exposure to the language or because they know a related language. That shouldn’t stop you, but don’t be discouraged if you feel like you have to work harder than your classmates. I would not take two languages first term freshman year, you need to be sure you can handle the pace of language learning at college which is much faster than high school.</p>
<p>I also want to add, that college isn’t necessarily the best place to solidify a language. In an ideal world I’d take a year in college so I knew the basics and then I would look for an opportunity to be immersed in the language - at least for a summer course.</p>
<p>As others have said, you don’t need to minor in these languages in order to focus on them in college.</p>
<p>Bear in mind that if you want to go to graduate school for history somewhere in the English-speaking world, you will need to be proficient in at least one language other than English (for US history–could also apply to British history at some places, but I think most departments require French and German for that), or in two or more relevant languages (for other subfields of history). Do French and Russian relate to your interests in history? If not, you may need to pick up more languages in college.</p>
<p>If for some reason you decide you want to do graduate work in history, having facility in two other languages will be a major - and I mean REALLY major - leg up in your application. Solid history graduates applying to grad school are a dime a dozen (and the good programs will reject far more than a dozen for every dime they accept), but having someone ready to pass the language qualifying exams (for history, usually two) at the time they enter, is really, really significant. </p>
<p>The minors aren’t necessary except as code language for facility. (You do need to spend time in a country where you can use it.)</p>
<p>I mostly intend to minor in them so that my work will go documented, that is so that I can have tangible proof of my abilities in terms of job applications and the such, but I actually intend to become a lawyer, not go to history grad-school. Is there maybe some sort of standardized test that I could take instead to prove my fluency? (assuming of course that I achieve it)</p>
<p>I’m actually bilingual and speak another language in addition to that, so French is my fourth and Russian would be my fifth. Ironically enough, my first language would be very useful if I became an historian, but as a lawyer wouldn’t be very practical. </p>
<p>I wholeheartedly agree with the immersion idea–though I can read and understand my third language very well, my speaking skills are rather limited and thus I intend to spend a summer in that country(where they speak my third language) in the next few years. I also plan on doing a semester abroad in France while in college, and possibly a summer-program or gap-year before graduate school in Russia or France.</p>
<p>You are going to be one of those kids my son hates, breezing through language four and five. You’ll probably be fine! If you’ve taken the courses and done well that’s generally all you need to do. On your resume you’ll write something like “Fluent Mandarin and Russian, reading knowledge of French.” I don’t know of American standard measures of language accomplishment. When I lived in Germany I took the Kleines Deutsches Sprachdiplom which basically said I was fluent in German. The EU has a six level rating system for European languages.</p>
<p>As for the issue of documentation, if someone really cares they can demand to see your transcript.</p>
<p>I have seen too many kids get hung up with double majoring and minoring and double minoring. Better you do well in the courses you take and get proficiency in the key subjects rather than worry about some of the details of getting the major/minor designations. If you can dio it without compromising other things, fine, but really, it isn’t that important.</p>
<p>As for language proficiency, I took one German lit course in college, but I am fluent in German. No diploma or other such thing, but I lived there a good part of my life, and a two minute conversation would cinch that. I am far more fluent than most any German major I have met unless they too lived biligually as I did. The same with many others I know who lived bi or tri lingually for many years with other languages. </p>
<p>DH hires those who have a strong math/statistical background, but few are major or minors in the area. They have taken the courses, however. </p>
<p>I am writing this because I’ve seen kids miss out on graduating on time, stress themselves out and get lousy grades simply taking on too much, by trying to double, triple major and minor. My son double majored, and was fine until the tail end, and nearly didn’t make his graduation on time. I would have gladly chosen a single major and for him to get out in 4 years with respectable grades than for him to have missed the mark and had to take another course this summer. He did make it, but I don’t even want to know what his last semester grades were, and he did cause some stress for all of us this month.</p>
<p>So why create such stress about graduating in four years? If the student needs an extra summer or semester to complete a challenging program, and the family finances permit, why not?</p>
<p>As an employer, I only care that you’re fluent in X language. Whether you got there by minoring in it, studying abroad, self study or it’s your family’s native language is completely irrelevant to me. “Minored in Russian” doesn’t carry one iota more weight than “fluent in Russian.”</p>
<p>Minored in Russian might even carry less weight, since I have no idea if it indicates fluency or not. Like cpt I am also fluent in German - I only took a year and half in college, but I spent parts of two summers there while in college and ended up living there for five years.</p>
<p>Note that minor requirements will vary by school and by language. At NYU, for instance, a Hebrew and Judaic Studies minor does not even need to have taken a language class. A German minor is 20 credits of which one must be Adv Composition and Grammar, so a student could start at zero and complete the minor upon completing Adv Comp and Grammar (4 or 6 classes depending on which sequence the student takes). In the Spanish department, Advanced Grammar and Composition is the first class to count towards the minor, and you need four classes on top of that, making it nine classes for the minor if you start at zero.</p>
<p>A DELF score for French and its equivalent for Russian hold much, much more weight than a minor. Those scores tell employers that you are certifiably proficient according to the people who codify the language, rather than simply that you’ve done coursework at the college level. </p>
<p>I’m a language major, though I dropped to a minor for a grand total of six days for the reasons mentioned above - it was my second major and I found I was getting too hung up about completing the major vs achieving fluency. I felt I was ready to take the DELE so what was the point of all the extra coursework, if it wasn’t making me more proficient? In the end I re-declared it because I actually found that I did miss the work, but doing it for the sake of the minor is pointless. Go for the proficiency exams instead.</p>
<p>Your tips and ideas have really made an impression on me, and I do think that it may be a better idea to just focus on learning the languages for their own sake, especially seeing as I don’t intend to teach them or anything like that. </p>
<p>I think I will reconsider my options when I actually get to college and maybe focus more on exposing myself to the cultures with films, books and other mediums.</p>
<p>My daughter is about to graduate with a major and double minors, plus a certificate program, and the honors college which has additional requirements, and she’s summa. (okay, just being proud of her with that last thing.) She has done it in four years. It’s all a matter of being really organized as you plan your course registration each term. My daughter was working off a spreadsheet she put together as a freshman.</p>
<p>I don’t blame 'rentof2 at all for being proud of her daughter, nor do I know enough about the daughter to have an opinion whether what she did was right for her or not. But my basic reaction to hearing that someone did all of her course registrations from a spreadsheet she put together as a freshman is: That’s why it’s a bad idea to have the accumulation of multiple majors and minors as a goal. I would have been disappointed in my own children if their interests and course plans hadn’t changed somewhat over the course of college (in one case, changed considerably), and I encouraged them from the start to leave space in their plans for that.</p>
<p>Yeah, well, people are the way they are and they’re not all the same… she knew what she wanted, and I wanted her to do it in four years (for financial reasons), so she figured it out. On top of that, she started when she was 16. So I guess you get a picture of who she is. ;)</p>
<p>My only request of both my kids is that they stay focused and try to finish in four years. One will, the other won’t. (Hopefully the 5th year will do the trick for that one.)</p>
<p>Ah, Annasdad, it’s the finances part. He’s number three out of 5 and we had them all in private schools before college as well. This has been a tough school year for us with 2 in college. It’ll be a bit easier from this point on, but this year was rough.</p>
<p>We are fortunate in that if it had to have been done, we could have managed it, but it makes it so much easier that he is now out. It would not have been worth the double major designation for him to have to continue throught the summer.</p>
<p>I think it’s wonderful when kids are so motivated that they can get their double majors, minors and do well. As a parent, it envy all the way, but I’m happy to say it’s a nice envy. But a lot of kids just can’t do it well and better you do a little bit less, but do it well and not stress yourself out.</p>
<p>For the OP, I guess my point would be that if you want to accomplish a major and two minors, that it’s best to start with a plan that will help you get there and be mindful about what you register for. You may have to make sure the classes you take fulfill specific requirements and won’t have the flexibility to take many that don’t.</p>
<p>As JHS points out, you may want to change your mind at some point, in which case you can easily ditch the plan and take a looser approach. But you can’t do it in the reverse – start out loose and less-planned, and mid-way through manage to get all those requirements met for the double minors without going past four years in school.</p>
<p>With one approach you have the option to choose, with the other you’ll end up in a jam or end up spending longer in school.</p>
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