<p>I double minored and one of my minors was Russian (the other minor was biology and my major was chemistry.). I started college having had 5 years of Russian in middle and high school, so started off in junior year level courses in college Russian. I felt very young! My first language was also a Slavic language, though I switched over to English as my primary language by first grade. I would say it could be hard to fit in enough classes starting from scratch. I don’t know if introductory level courses count towards the minor. I agree with what others have said. The minor means little. It’s how well you speak that counts. If you do a semester in Russia you will probably pick up a lot more than in formal coursework. (By the way, I don’t use my Russian at all ever. It has not come in very useful in the career path I have chosen.)</p>
<p>'rent, here’s the problem I see with your approach: If you start out with a plan that pretty much dictates every course you take, there’s a good chance that you will implement that plan. Which means that you would devote your entire college career to executing a plan you developed knowing only what you had learned through high school. That seems like a missed opportunity to me.</p>
<p>Most American curriculum designs leave a lot of room for electives, because faculties know that students often find their true passion through an elective they take, not through the major they thought they wanted (or their parents thought they wanted) when they started college. If you don’t take any electives, you don’t give yourself that chance. Most of the subjects taught in college aren’t even taught – or are taught extremely badly – in high school; there are huge areas of human inquiry that high school students know nothing at all about when they start college. And most colleges have faculty that do some things better than others, and students are best served by learning what the best faculty are teaching, not what the students thought they wanted to learn before they knew what was available.</p>
<p>When I started college, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Except a series of lectures I attended my freshman year clued me into the fact that different departments approached the same set of materials in different ways, and I probably belonged not in the department I originally thought but in another one, which had people who were doing things that really excited me. My son had his life completely changed by an elective he took at the beginning of his second year. It would have been a terrible thing if either of us had been so plan-bound that we never looked at what was available elsewhere.</p>
<p>I did the same thing as you in college, so I get that. My daughter is on a different track, she has understood her path from an early age. My husband was the same way, he knew early, he focused on the one thing while in college (acting) and grad school and he’s had a career in that field ever since he left school. His life is no less rich than anyone else’s – in fact, it’s the envy of most. People need to be free to excel in the way they excel. It’s going to be different for different people. My daughter has known since she was a little spud she wanted to be a writer, but she is also a musician, and has an interest in literature as an academic. She was happy as a clam in college studying these things she loves. She’ll continue to pursue them out of school, in grad school eventually, and maybe even in something job related – although she didn’t go into it for the employment security. ;)</p>
<p>So it’s not “my approach.” My personal approach was MUCH different. But it is her approach and it’s worked out very well for her so far and she feels immensely lucky to have had the opportunities she’s had. You can’t judge it from the outside, because it’s someone else’s path. They get to choose.</p>
<p>My intention was to let the OP know that it can be done – assuming it’s what he/she wants. It does take some planning, however.</p>
<p>JHS and rentof2: I’m one of those who had a plan from the beginning and I’ve stuck by it pretty closely, all things considered. I definitely wondered if I was missing out (part of my reasons fr briefly dropping the second major). I think, though, that an exception can sometimes be made for higher-level classes in a language, because depending on the department, there may be a good amount of variety within the discipline. For example, so far, I’ve taken an art history class, a film class, a history/religion class, a cultural history class and a straight-up Spanish literature class, all counting towards a Spanish major. The art history class counts for art history majors, the film class counts for film majors, and I suspect the religion class would count for religious studies majors. There are also politics and anthropology classes in the Spanish department that count towards both those majors and towards Spanish.</p>
<p>This depends on the school and department, of course, but in specific cases, I think there’s a middle road.</p>