<p>My daughter is interested in majoring in multiple languages in college with an eye to either diplomacy or another form of translating. She is currently a junior in hs and has already taken Spanish (her major language), French, Latin and Hebrew and will be going to a summer program in Arabic. She is looking at Columbia and Brown and is interested in schools in large urban areas. Any recommendations? She is not interested in small LACs like Middlebury (at least not now).</p>
<p>Pitt has a great Japanese program and offers many other languages as well. When you are asking about programs, check to see how the language is taught. For example, some schools focus on writing and reading first, others speaking. In the speaking portion of DD’s language class, all of the instructors are native speakers. It was very difficult to determine how good a language program was.</p>
<p>DD looked at Georgetown and Michigan for languages. Stanford and Berkeley are supposed to be good as well. It does depend somewhat on which languages she will pursue in college. In D’s search, she wanted schools that offered German, Japanese, and Russian, which was a difficult combo to find.</p>
<p>U of Chicago should fit the bill pretty well.</p>
<p>American
Boston College
Boston U
Duke
Emory
Harvard
Northwestern
NYU
Penn
Tufts
Washington
Wash U
Wisconsin</p>
<p>Harvard
Penn
UChicago
Georgetown</p>
<p>Another vote for the University of Chicago. It offers instruction in some 49 languages and has the oldest Linguistics department in the country, as well as a number of well-developed Area Studies programs.
[UC</a> Center for the Study of Languages](<a href=“http://languages.uchicago.edu/studies/courses.htm]UC”>http://languages.uchicago.edu/studies/courses.htm)</p>
<p>Thanks to everyone with suggestions. I wasn’t clear in my first post; she in interested in school where she doesn’t have to concentrate in only one language. She is also a jock and needs a school with a big sports presence. I would love her to look at Univ of Chicago but, without sports, she isn’t interested. She would like a school where she could play club volleyball or soccer(has played on varsity teams since middle school). Columbia is a possibility because of the combined masters in public policy and languages and Brown because she can compose her own major. Her safety school is UVA (not exactly a safety but she is first in her class and we are in state so a likely match).</p>
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<p>Who says Chicago doesn’t have sports? It has varsity, club, and intramural volleyball, and varsity and intramural soccer, among many others—a total of 585 varsity athletes, 800 participants in club sports, and 6,154 participants in IM sports. It is no longer a member of the Big Ten and no longer gives athletic scholarships; but then, neither does Columbia, and as I recall Columbia usually performs pretty miserably in the major intercollegiate sports, so it’s hard to see how that can be a distinguishing feature between the two schools.</p>
<p>Agree completely about Univ of Chicago and sports. But she is a 16 year old girl who wants a football and basketball presence. I know it isnt available at Columbia but she thinks the campus in NY and the program outweighs the negatives. And, again, she is a 16 year old girl – not exactly at a logical stage. My family is in Chicago and we will visit there and Northwestern this spring, combined with a family vist. Who knows what will change?</p>
<p>I personally would recommend that you consider applying to a real safety, rather than thinking that you have a “likely match” at one of the most selective (broadly speaking) universities in the country. Your choice.</p>
<p>As for college recommendations:</p>
<p>Washington U in St. Louis
U North Carolina - Chapel Hill
Georgetown U
Emory U
Brown</p>
<p>I third Emory as a recommendation… great for language, especially French!</p>
<p>UVA is also generous with AP credit, which seems to be helpful when a student is interested in multiple majors or concentrations. Schools with less restrictive cores may work better as well, which could be a negative for Chicago.</p>
<p>It might be a little harder to do multiple languages in a school with lots of distribution requirements, but I’m not sure—just look into that. I guess that would be a vote in favor of Brown! But if she wants to get a lot of attention from super professors in the language departments and be surrounded by athlete kids, Middlebury would be perfect.</p>
<p>Georgetown sounds like the perfect school for her.</p>
<p>I have a good friend at Texas who double-majored in Persian and German.</p>
<p>I think your daughter would like the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Both have excellent foreign language departments across the board, excellent Political Science departments and strong football traditions.</p>
<p>Brown is a good choice.</p>
<p>Open Curriculum and national university both mean that your daughter can take nothing but language courses for the next four years: ancient, modern, and obscure.</p>
<p>If your daughter is statistically qualified, top of her class + high standardized testing, she might apply Early Decision if she’s absolutely passionate about languages and intent on fulling pursuing that one interest.</p>
<p>However, since your daughter is a jock, she may not like the hipster, ultra-liberal culture.</p>
<p>In that case, consider Amherst, which has both an Open Curriculum and a very athletic culture. Amherst is located in a New England town whose population is 36,000. Add the 27,000 students from UMass, the 1,600 students from Amherst, the 1,400 students from Hampshire, and you’re ready to go. Amherst’s participation in the Five College Consortium with the aforementioned schools, and also Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, offers enough social and cultural opportunities to compensate for the lack of a large urban area. And, the campus of Amherst is aesthetically pleasing enough that your daughter may just be convinced that a smaller school is the right choice.</p>
<p>Be wary of Columbia and Chicago, both of which have core curricula that many of my friends have deemed oppressive, a daunting hassle to get out of the way. Both are urban, but neither offer an athletic culture–Columbia is home to hipsters and doesn’t quite have a campus culture, and Chicago is home to intellectuals who take themselves very seriously.</p>
<p>kwu, Pam-B’s daughter seems to want a larger university with very diverse offerings in languages, a strong athletic tradition (preferably in Football or Basketball) and located in an urban setting. </p>
<p>Amherst is a college with fewer than 2,000 students, has limited offerings in languages (virtually no offerings Arabic, Hebrew or Latin), practically no true Football or Basketball tradition and is located in a semi-rural town with a population of 35,000. I don’t think Amherst is a match.</p>
<p>Brown is a much better option, although it lacks major athletic tradition…but in all other respects, seems to meet Pam-B’s daughter’s criteria.</p>
<p>For sports plus lots of languages, a lot of state flagships would fit the bill. The Big Ten schools sound like they might be ideal – Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio State all have what she’s looking for and offer metropolitan surroundings to boot. (Don’t be fooled by Madison’s size…it has everything city dwellers love.)</p>
<p>There’s language study, and then there’s exceptional language study. For the latter, and especially if the likelihood is high that your D will pursue a serious career in diplomacy/foreign affairs/translation you may want to think out of the box. Think international. In North America McGill would be an exceptional place to develop deep skills in French as well as other languages. And in Europe there are a handful of universities that will be excellent matches.</p>