Please Help: Way, way in the future

mini
Thu, 23 Dec 2004 20:43:40 +0000

One thing I would absolutely urge if you see this as a future career direction: make sure you have reading knowledge of at least one, and preferably two, foreign languages before you go to graduate school. This is especially true if you think you are not “good at languages”, or don’t like studying them. I have seen at least two studies that suggest the single most important factor in whether a student actually completes a Ph.D. is whether the necessary languages were mastered before admission to the program. Obviously, if you plan to do sociological studies of folks in western India, you’ll need to know Gujarati. But more generally, historians learn German and French, and sociologists German and the language of the culture they study.

At any rate, when you get to Stanford, check with the departments in which you are most keenly interested. Alternatively, you can go to various graduate program websites, and see what they say about language study. Whatever you do, don’t put it off.