Quality vs Quantity

anon2012
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 11:37:18 +0000

I’m no expert, but I think the quality would be better. E.g. If a multinational company has hired someone who speaks fluent English and Japanese, they would have more success sending them over to a branch in Japan, than someone who speaks fluent English, and very basic Japanese, Spanish, and German.

With the instruments, if someone wants to join a band, they’d presumably be looking for proficiency in a certain instrument. (I don’t know, I’m not musical and most of my friends who are know multiple instruments.) If you show passion, dedication and skill for one thing, but maybe try out other hobbies (e.g. Grade 8 Piano and Grade 3 Flute), then it would show that you’re responsible for your own learning, can set and reach your own goals, and can spend years on a certain thing without abandoning it.

But it depends on your situation. If your school only offered one language, which you found difficult for whatever reason, then in junior year, you started self-teaching yourself a completely different language, gained progress in it, and even visited the country/made penfriends and practiced it, but only got up to an intermediate level, that may still say a lot to admissions staff. Would it be useful to your job? It depends what your job is.

There’s a big difference in skill and usefulness between playing four instruments “fairly well” and playing one “incredibly well,” and having basic language skills (casual conversation, ordering food) and being native-level in one language (can make a living, write a novel). With your examples, the instrument case would be ambiguous since both scenarios IMO require a similar amount of effort, but with the languages, learning one to proficiency and being able to use it with few problems outweighs knowing some phrases and grammar in a few languages. But it depends on your exposure to the foreign languages, and the opportunities you have (e.g. school does not offer certain language to AP; need to self-study; family is monolingual; vs. you’ve lived in the country for some time; grew up bilingual; access to courses; travel a lot).

A similar thing could be seen in IT. Someone who knows C++ very well, but nothing else, compared to someone who’s intermediate in most things: PHP, SQL, C, Python, Java, etc. It would depend on the company and what they do. And there’d be a lot of variance between job roles, candidate requirements, etc.

Basically if you find something you can do, and you try hard in it and seek out opportunities to practice and use it, you’re doing well. It depends whether people are looking for versatility or proficiency, and I’m not an admissions officer (obviously) but as long as you can show why you made these choices, I doubt any of these achievements would be seen detrimental. (Coming from a non-musical, only bilingual person, who would be impressed with any of these scenarios. xD)

I hope this wasn’t too long. |D