Chemistry as a second minor?

AuraObscura
Thu, 29 May 2014 18:41:35 +0000

A minor is “directed” in the sense that there are requirements you will have to fulfill, which could possibly include taking specific courses you have little or no interest in. Minors don’t show employers or grad school anything a transcript with those classes and a line on your resume wouldn’t also show (which, by the way, is exactly how much space a minor would also take up on a resume, only instead of writing “Minor: Chemistry” or “Minor: Linguistics” you would have a line a bit farther down about other interests, coursework, skills, or experience), and there is literally no difference between “structured” and “unstructured” classes if an employer or graduate school will be looking at your transcript anyway.

However, to answer your question of whether or not to pursue them and which to pursue, sure, absolutely. As a person with many interests myself, I took a variety of classes in a variety of disciplines in college and always encourage others to do the same. However, other than maybe a couple niche jobs, I can’t imagine either linguistics or chemistry will help you down the line with employment or graduate school, and neither of them will really complement a CIT major/web development concentration in any significant way. Maybe linguistics, as computational linguistics, applied linguistics, and programming linguistics are areas I’ve heard about quite a bit over the past couple years (though it’s not my field, so don’t give my observation too much weight).

Like Ctesiphon said, do it for your own personal fulfillment. It won’t really help with jobs or grad school.