I’m a current high school junior who’s looking for some advice on college majors in the future. Currently I’m interested in my language classes and my cultural anthropology class. I wanted to know if any of my interests (linguistics and/or anthropology) could translate into an applicable career path in the future. If so then which college majors and minors should I begin to explore while applying to college, as well as what jobs would be available for people of my certain interests and would they be valuable/rewarding in any sense?
First of all, understand that linguistics is not the same as studying languages. Linguistics is the study of the construction, meaning, context, and use of language in general. Many people who enjoy studying languages will enjoy linguistics, but not necessarily.
But yes, both linguistics and anthropology could translate into applicable career paths. There are many, many jobs that don’t require any specific major, and will hire you simply because you have a BA.
Many government, public policy, international relations jobs will benefit from a linguistics and/or anthropology major. There are also jobs within marketing, HR, management, advertising, user experience and other related fields that benefit from an understanding of how people and culture operate. (Google, for example, has some researchers that work specifically on improving their internal culture.) Linguistics is useful in the natural language processing research that a lot of tech companies are doing to make products like Siri, Cortana, the Amazon Echo, etc.
And then there are the completely unrelated things that are going to just be based on your skills. Like you can be a software developer with an anthropology degree if you know how to program!