<p>Hmmm...nj<em>azn</em>premed, a lot of well-rounded people do get into the top colleges. As a person who went to both the Harvard and Yale prefreshman visitation programs, I met a fair share of admits who had been obviously admitted because of their immense talent in one field, but I met just as many students who had been immersed in a wide range of fields. These people included prospective science majors who had won essay contests and been involved in theatre and music, and prospective humanities majors who had participated in science fair contests and math competitions. Speaking on a personal level, I (admitted to HYP) wrote for my Harvard and Yale applications one of my essays about a purely "humanities activity" and the other about my take on scientific advancement.</p>
<p>That being said, top colleges do like to admit students who have a lot of passion for the subjects they're interested in and the activities they pursue -- only, the passion doesn't have to be in one field, but rather, for the whole landscape of one's interests, which may be incredibly diverse.</p>
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The funny part is your talents clearly lie more in the realm of the humanities/linguistics and yet you're applying for a biology major. You have not given us any extracurriculars or awards to indicate that you are a science-oriented individual. Therefore, I have little doubt you will be rejected by most, if not all of the top colleges.
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<p><em>rolleyes</em></p>
<p>You have no idea what linguistics is, my friend. </p>
<p>Linguistics is the science and theory of language, drawing from the fields of acoustics and physics, neuroscience and physiology, philosophy, information theory and high-level math [especially if you're going into generative grammar], and also has an alliance with artificial intelligence and other computer-science fields. Its principles become especially important in the study of information integration in a neural net and the problem of conception versus perception, as well as nativism versus behaviourism. </p>
<p>So please, educate yourself about the science/humanities dichotomy first, which by the way, is a Western idea (pioneered by Aristotle's conceptions of classification), and becoming an increasingly outdated one. </p>
<p>Do you know the Fourier transforms involved when artificial speech programs attempt to generate a dental consonant and link it between two vowels, and why many such synthetic programs are imperfect thus making the speech sound metallic? </p>
<p>Or did you think that calculus was completely absent in linguistics, you ignorant dolt?</p>
<p>Just because someone is fluent in a lot of languages it doesn't mean they are 'linguists'. It just means they are fluent in a lot of languages. </p>
<p>OP does state an interest in a double major- biology (probably coz parents want her to be a doctor?) and Japanese literature which no doubt springs from her fluency in Japanese. </p>
<p>OP: It looks to me like you're applying to the right mix of colleges. Iowa is a safety, I guess? Northwestern and Rice should be safeties (or safe match) too, I'd hope.</p>
<p>Vicarious Parent, wow, i had completely no idea the level of complexity that dwells within linguistics. As it is probably a common misconception to associate linguistics with fluency i too was ignorant of this bit of information. Thanks, it actually sounds very cool, maybe i will sit in on a class in college on it.</p>
<p>You stand out to me... mastery of that many languages is HARD. Srsly that to me is more impressive than all of your other ECs put together, but of course I don't know if ad officers will agree. Colleges aren't supposed to take your planned major into account, but you can always just put Japanese on your app or decline to state a major.</p>
<p>Make sure to stress any awards/accomplishments in your ECs and elaborate rather than just listing them (as you did with Ballet), and definitely include your music accomplishments.</p>
<p>just curious, have you looked at U Chicago?</p>
<p>Also, you are fluent in Japanese? Why would you double major in i then? I'm pretty positive that if you are fluent in Japanese, a Japanese lit. major won't do much for you really. In fact, I don't really know of any Japanese depts. in the country that focus on literature until grad school because the point of undergrad languages in America is to teach languages to you...from the perspective that you are not fluent in the langauge at all. For a true japanese literature major you'de probably have to look into Japanese Universities, where japanese classes arent about learning the language(since they all already know it), but about learning about language through advanced literature.</p>
<p>Grad school is really where it is at when it comes to literature in the US, because that's where, if you are doing say japanese lit, chinese lit, etc, they expect you to already know the language very proficiently, if not fluently.</p>
<p>To bigtwix: I have looked at uchicago, but I just felt like I wouldn't fit in with all the alternitive-ish kids over there. </p>
<p>I'm fine with Spanish literature if whatever school I attend dosen't have Japanese literature. I have also been looking at foreign colleges such as Todai, Kyoto University and Oxford. I just didn't put them up because I didn't expect that many people to know of those schools. </p>
<p>your post really speaks to me. i'm also a prospective language major trying to find a program that can challenge an already-proficient speaker (or in my case reader as i study dead languages).</p>
<p>my advice to you would be to look up the gourman report or nrc (national research council) rankings for the graduate programs (not undergraduate) that are top in japanese.* you can also use the IPEDS database to find what institutions had the most majors in your language graduate the last year. (this is very time-consuming, but the c.c. user collegehelp has several recent threads with the data all in one place.) </p>
<p>some of the programs you find are going to be at huge state universities that instantly turn you off. don't discount these immediately--most of them have smaller honors colleges, and you can probably get a nice scholarship offer from them, especially with nm status. the others will probably be at schools you had heard of, but didn't know were outstanding in your field. look up the departments and faculty there, then do a little reading in the student newspaper. you will quickly get a sense of what it is like to do work in your field at that university.</p>
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<li>i say graduate programs because, as a previous poster pointed out, undergrad language programs in the us tend to be focused mostly on acquisition. you need a literature/culture type program, which will only be available where there's a grad department</li>
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<p>its sad that i cant do lit. :( and I thought that there would be plenty of kids in HYP calibre schools that had plenty of people fluent in more than one language. I might want to do Spanish language or learn something new.</p>
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your post really speaks to me. i'm also a prospective language major trying to find a program that can challenge an already-proficient speaker (or in my case reader as i study dead languages).
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<p>Next stop: theory of universal grammar, with Noam Chomsky? :p</p>
<p>yeah i know Mandarin, Hindi, Swahili, Arabic and Farsi (from rosetta stone) so i am kinda like you.. well not really.. but I know Hindi/Mandarin/English the best (I am going to be in Chinese 6 next year and my parents are North Indian) so I will probably learn Arabic in college.. </p>
<p>as for admission.. in the words of the Kenyans, hakuna matata :)</p>