<p>It is my understanding that Yale does not currently offer minors. So, I am wondering for those who attend, or will attend, what is your attitude towards this and do you feel it does or will inhibit you in your studying? Thanks!</p>
<p>Understand that your degree doesn’t say anything other than Yale - and it’s in Latin - with no major listed.</p>
<p>I’m glad they don’t have minors. What’s the point? You take a wide range of courses for your requirements. You pick a field of study that you love. You major in it. If you really have two fields of study that you love equally, you double major. You take classes that interest you. Done.</p>
<p>well if there are more things you want to explore that aren’t equal to a “major” that you still want to have credit for knowing, a minor is normally the place for that</p>
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<p>[Yale</a> Daily News - Faculty to discuss minors](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/29042]Yale”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/29042)</p>
<p>They’re considering implementing minors. It may happen in some departments (smaller ones) and not others. I think the idea is fairly popular among undergraduates. </p>
<p>Every policy change is slow at yale. It might happen next year, or it might take five years.</p>
<p>It’s a lot of fuss over nothing. For some reason, students – especially high school students – are in love with minors and double- and triple-majors. I guess they think it will make them more employable. Maybe in some cases that’s true, but generally for students coming out of Yale it’s not necessary.</p>
<p>My major was Literature, but I did enough Economics to constitute a minor in most other universities. My resume said “significant coursework in Economics”, and also of course showed the Wall Street internship (and follow-up summer job) I had gotten with support from the university. I didn’t get a job offer from everyone with whom I interviewed, but I did fine.</p>
<p>Minors strike me as being a good way to encourage students to persist with studying a second language, moving towards real fluency and subsequently to spend serious time immersed in that other language, such as a semester abroad.</p>
<p>^Why? Six courses (pretty common for a minor) hardly guarantees “real fluency”, and language fluency is something you don’t need a transcript to certify. You either got it or you ain’t, and anyone who cares can probably judge whether you got it and to what extent in a 30-second conversation. Uniquely, language fluency is its own reward. Plus, I suspect that in most cases a language minor will require at least a couple of literature courses, and lots of people who value fluency in a language have 0 interest in its literature. So I would think that language minors actually wind up DIScouraging real fluency in favor of competence plus minimal knowledge of literature and culture.</p>
<p>I’m sure the faculty will get into this but college language has two issues, verbal fluency and written competence if not fluency. These are not necessarily closely related, as in Mandarin and other Asian languages. Once you’ve reached a point of verbal fluency - to the point where immersion in the country will push you along very quickly - you still have the very high hurdle of written fluency. </p>
<p>As to the content of minors, most schools don’t design language minors solely around verbal or written competency but include not only literature, as noted, but culture and society or politics classes. Even if you have an interest in the literature - and if you can write the language well enough so the class doesn’t eat 30 hours a week - you may really be put off by the additional stuff.</p>
<p>^Without getting too technical about it, being able to write competently in another language is a fairly rare skill in the U.S… (I won’t go the English Prof route and point out how the ability to write competently in English is also scarce…having a U.S. President who is articulate is one of the brightest spots on the horizon these days). </p>
<p>Of course it is possible to take a few courses in another language/culture and make oneself understood in that setting, without necessarily being any good at understanding unwritten codes, or communicating across social divisions. Still, it strikes me as good thing to have a mechanism such as allowing students to declare a minor: perhaps it would encourage a student to take a 5th or 6th course in a language, as opposed to doing the minimum, but not moving forward with it. I’m thinking, too, of that major gift that Yale received for International Relations a few weeks back. Perhaps some of that can go towards encouraging students to study abroad in non-English speaking countries.</p>
<p>When I was at Yale, hardly anyone studied abroad during college. Why would we have? We were at what we thought was the greatest university in the world. Why toss out 13% of your limited time there just to get better practice in speaking a foreign language?</p>
<p>My kids, independently, reached the same conclusion about their great university. They are interested in languages, interested in travelling and living abroad, but really didn’t want to take second-rate courses so they could get more conversational practice in.</p>
<p>On the language front, I have a somewhat weird take. I always cared much more about literature than about negotiating prices at local markets, etc. I studied a bunch of languages, and I am reading-fluent in two of them and OK in several more, but I am not an accentless speaker or a fluid writer in any of them. (I do much better speaking and writing the one where I spent nine months living in the home country when I was 15.) It never seemed that rewarding to me to put in the effort to improve my fluency that much. As for understanding unwritten codes and communicating across social divisions . . . a lot of that stuff is actually written down (or filmed, or recorded), if you know where to look for it. I listen to a lot of hip-hop in my favorite foreign languages; I have always wondered why none of my kids’ teachers ever even suggested they do that.</p>
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<p>D feels exactly the same way (as do many of her friends). How could you give up a whole semester at Yale?!? So instead, they’ve gone abroad in the summer - D spent 6 weeks in Paris last year. While that’s not as much time spent speaking a language as a semester would be, it was a great supplement to her Yale classes. Then again, D isn’t a language major; actually, she is, but neither language is really spoken any more!</p>
<p>Quote:</p>
<p>When I was at Yale, hardly anyone studied abroad during college. Why would we have? We were at what we thought was the greatest university in the world. Why toss out 13% of your limited time there just to get better practice in speaking a foreign language? </p>
<p>Well, because study abroad is about more than getting better practice in speaking a foreign language. Yale is surely wonderful and life-changing, but there can be a limited number of times in one’s life when it’s possible to meet and spend time with people with a radically different view of the world than your own, and hear what they have to say, and exchange ideas with them, in their own language. </p>
<p>Because college students who have significant international experience and a Yale education could help make for a better world for our grandchildren.</p>
<p>Classics major! </p>
<p><3 Yale classics dept.</p>
<p>I’m a Yale student, and I never before even thought about Yale’s lack of minors. I think that’s a strong argument in favor of Yale’s system:
-Major (about 12 courses)
-Distribution (about 6 courses)
-Whatsoever you Please (18 courses)</p>
<p>Seeing as modern employment has next to nothing to do with your major, it’s difficult to argue that a minor serves any particular purpose.</p>