Somewhat related: Found out during Winter break which is going on now that the Mandarin class my kid is taking is the highest undergraduate level course at his college, and he’s been told he has to petition to get into graduate Mandarin class. The only other Mandarin class he can take is Business Mandarin and Mandarin Literature class. I don’t know why they don’t offer truly advanced classes in Mandarin at top colleges. I will tell my kid to talk to an appropriate professor and get some advice.
So petition. But Business Mandarin certainly seems to apply to what many posters here have said about the requisite lang skills. Not a hs subject test, eg. This isn’t about getting in more literature analysis. …
Yeah, he is going to meet with a prof to see how likely the petition will be granted.
My D is majoring in business and a foreign language and minoring in another. She hopes to use her languages in her career and there definitely seem to be opportunities to do so in her field, but the main reason she’s studying them is because she enjoys languages.
@itsgettingreal17 – that’s the best reason to study foreign languages! But yes, the combination of a business degree with a proficciency in a foreign language or two will be attractive to employers.
Just a tip. Once thing your son can do is set up an alert on Indeed for search terms like “foreign language” or “name of language”. You can set it to be nationwide and automatically email you alerts. There are often government postings and from businesses including top firms like Google but those are more for linguists, not polyglots. I have these alerts set up and, honestly, most of the listings are for things like fraud analysis, being a car rental rep at higher end of the payscale and then down to ordinary $12-15/hour customer service jobs. Setting up those alerts can help him think about where he’d like to see himself. Nice opportunities can happen if the profs have good connections, too.
My son had wanted to study French since he was about 5. No kidding – he lobbied for the after school enrichment program in kindergarten French! He was in third level French as a high school freshman and spent his sophomore year in a French public high school, living with a French family in Provence. He did not want to major in French – he was interested in conversation and current events more than literature. But when he got to college, he tested into 6th semester college French. He told me he was the only person in the class that could actually speak and sometimes was able to assist the professor with pronunciation and grammar. As a freshman.
Fast forward. His command of French has helped him on the job. His first real post-college job was the assistant manager of a boutique NYC hotel. He was the go-to person for all the foreign guests. He’s used his language skills in every position he’s had – but now he is getting calls from recruiters who are looking for French fluency along with sales, marketing, and hospitality skills.
Well, apparently they do at the college in question - it just happens to be graduate level, which is not unusual. If that school is like mine, the petition is a formality. If the student has the prereqs, and the class is not at its limit (a rarity at the grad level), the petition is almost always granted.
I’ve been thinking this: why not business Mandarin? The following summer, a neat internship requiring this savvy. Maybe international. Then advanced Mandarin, last year(s) of college. This would be a nice jump on the resume.
“I was thinking of business development or marketing/sales departments of SV companies.”
Another possibility you may want to consider is what’s typically called internationalization (I18N) and localization (l10N) group in high tech companies. They are sometimes in marketing, sometimes in the product group (engineering, product management) and most are based in the US. It’s more written focused, translating docs, user interfaces to the local language, so I think Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean written ability is most important. I don’t think they do marketing which would be in the countries if that’s what your son is really interested in, like working on an event in China, doing a regional announcement, or marketing campaign in Korea.
They may be in kinds of companies as well, but I’m most familiar with high tech. It’s also something you can look not for internships but after graduation as well.
Law firms, public defender offices, prosecutors & immigration law firms all need bilingual or multilingual paralegals & lawyers.
Many large US law firms have offices abroad.
Thanks for examples.
D1 only had a French minor, but that type of head start helped with her Peace Corps placement. She is a school teacher in West Africa. She is learning conversational Malinke which may never come up again once she returns.
We had an exchange student from Spain spend two summers with us learning English. He spent two more summers with other families. In a lousy job market, those language skills are much more valuable. He is currently working in Switzerland. He also speaks German, French, and Mandarin.
There is a high need for interpreters in legal and health care settings. In the legal system, this is separate from the lawyers and paralegals knowing more than one language. Lawyers should not be doing their own interpreting for their clients.
@rosered55 brings up something important. Interpreting is a much more marketable skill than translating and it pays a lot more. If your son’s brain works that way to be an interpreter that can be a great field to get into.
Just following up on the original post. At the end of his freshman year in college, our kid still doesn’t know 100% what area he wants to pursue but he seems to be challenging himself to improve his writing and taking varied courses in IR and Econ while engaged in several interesting ECs.
More importantly, he did get a pretty good summer internship with stipend in China after two interviews and a lengthy vetting process, and he believes his relative fluency in Mandarin is what got him the summer internship position in some IR area even though there were students with better GPAs. I have no idea what our kid’s GPA is because I don’t ask him – and in some sense don’t care that much – what his grades are. One good thing about getting an internship position in China is he can further improve his Mandarin skills especially in reading and writing because he already reached the highest level of Mandarin classes available in his college, so there is no higher level Mandarin class he can take at his college.
I think his goals while in college are to take interesting courses, to gain practical experiences through ECs and internships and to become as fluent as possible in English, Mandarin, Korean and Spanish and find out what area he’s interested and pretty good in.
@rosered55: Regarding your post #53 above-it is only partially correct.
In a court room setting–hearing or trial–clearly attorneys, and certainly their paralegals, cannot “testify” for their client. One needs a certified court interpreter for trials or hearings.
But for intake, a lawyer or paralegal certainly can act as an interpreter for the client. Happens everyday in immigration matters & criminal defense interviews (usually by public defenders or their paralegals).
P.S. In some criminal appellate matters, original testimony in the foreign language is used over the court certified translator’s version. Appellate divisions hire paralegals to “reinterpret” testimony in a foreign language.