Should I get a minor or focus on research?

Graduate School
1

<p>I am a senior at the University of Oregon. My major in Linguistics, and my minor is in Japanese. I am also in the Clark Honors College. I am on task to fulfill my major and honors college requirements by the Spring. However, Japanese would require two more classes. </p>

<p>Right now I am taking 19 credits. Next semester, if I wanted to graduate without my minor, I would need a minimum of 13 credits, and for the Spring I would need 12. However, if I wanted to graduate with the minor in Japanese, I would need 17 credits, and then 16 for Spring. All of those extra credits would be in Japanese literature, taught in English.</p>

<p>I'm not afraid of hard work, and if classwork was my only concern, I'd happily take the literature classes. However, I'm also doing an undergraduate thesis. With my coursework right now, I'm finding it almost impossible to do the reading/coding I need to get my research done. </p>

<p>This is all very frustrating for me, because I spent my junior year abroad in Tokyo, and I speak Japanese just as well or better than anyone who had fulfilled the minimum requirements for the minor--it's just that my department wants a certain number of courses to come from their literature sequence. </p>

<p>My plan right now is to go abroad and teach English for a few years, hopefully in Japan, and then get my PhD in linguistics, with a focus in second language acquisition. My professor told me once that committees like to see minors to show the well roundedness of a candidate. A language minor would certainly complement my major. However, I know that research is also important, and I want to do a stellar job on my thesis to show graduate schools that I can contribute good scholarship.</p>

<p>I am also worried that, if I don't take the literature courses, my course load will look a little weak. I was thinking of taking a two credit, self-study language class, to bump myself up to at least 15 credits for winter term. </p>

<p>Any thoughts, internet? </p>

2

<p>I’d rather focus on research at this point. Research experience will most likely outweigh a minor.</p>

3

<p>I think you need to redirect the question. Is it important to you personally to have the minor, or did you just want to learn Japanese?</p>

<p>Because on the one hand, graduate schools don’t really care about minors. Graduate departments don’t want to see “well-rounded” students like in undergrad; they want students who are prepared to do the work in a specific area of focus. The other thing, though, is that actually having the label of a minor on your transcript is not what’s important - what’s important is the coursework you did to get the minor. If classes in literature are not important for linguistics, and I suspect they are not, then taking the two extra literature classes is not going to matter. (You also don’t need to be concerned about how your course load “looks” to graduate committees. They don’t care whether you overload yourself with a lot of extra classes or take it easy.)</p>

<p>On the other hand, though I don’t see what the issue is with taking 16-17 credits a semester in your final year is. This changes a bit, though, if your thesis doesn’t count as course credit. Can’t you register for major credit for your thesis? At my alma mater, thesis work was worth 4 credits per semester for your senior year; at a lot of schools you can get credit for thesis work (or maybe something like independent study). I took 16 credits in the fall and 14 credits in the spring of my senior year, but 4 of those credits each semester was the thesis work.</p>

<p>If you really 1) don’t want to take, or don’t care about, the Japanese literature classes and 2) think that taking a 16-17 hour course load next year is going to make your thesis difficult to complete, then I advocate focusing on the thesis. The classes won’t matter, but it’s not like your prior Japanese coursework and fluency ceases to matter because you don’t have a minor in it. The classes are still on your transcript.</p>