Will Lack of Foreign Language be Detrimental to My Application?

Colleges & Universities Carleton College
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<p>I am a rising senior with a few questions about the highschool foreign language requirements at Carleton and other top LACs and Universities.</p>

<p>I’ll begin by just placing my stats so that, if you would like, you can read over them to get an idea of where my application would stand. If you don’t need to do this, feel free to skip over this part of the post.</p>

<p>GENERAL INFO
-Sex: Male
-Race: White
-Location: Public highschool in Oklahoma (don’t know if the state matters)
-Will be applying for financial aid</p>

<p>ACADEMICS
-Prospective Major: Physics
-GPA: 4.0 unweighted; about 4.5ish weighted
-Rank: top 5% of class; not really sure actually, about 10 out of 550ish I think
-ACT: 33 sophomore year; 30E, 32M, 35R, 36S (I’ve always wondered if they care what grade you were in when you got your score)
-SAT: 780M, 710CR, 730W; 2220 or 1490 total
-SAT II: Math II - 760, Physics - 800
-AP: Calc AB - 5; English Language - 4; Physics C Mech. - 5
-APs for next year: Calc BC, Euro, Lit, Physics C E&M, Chem, possibly Psych
-I recently attended a summer class entitled “Cosmology, Anti-Gravity, and the Runaway Universe” on full scholarship at Colorado College and recieved an A.
-National Merit Finalist (going to be)
-Valedictorian (My schools has a strange system so I can be Valedictorian even though I’m tenth in my class)</p>

<p>EXTRACURRICULARS
-President and Founder of Philosophy Club
-Head Programmer and Captain of Award winning and World Championship Finalist FIRST Robotics Team
-President of Mu Alpha Theta
-Paid TA in robotics summer classes for middle schoolers
-Paid TA in vocal music, comedic acting, and commercial acting summer classes for elementary schoolers
-Homeland cashier (represent)
-Math tutor
-Acting outside of school for 7 years and leads in summers musicals for the past three years
-soccer for 12 years including highschool soccer freshman and sophomore years
-Cross Country Letterman freshman and sophomore years
-There’s a little bit more but it’s mostly lame stuff so I’ll leave it out.</p>

<p>OTHER ADMISSIONS TOPICS
I feel like my essays will be strong but an interview will be the strongest non-academic portion of my application. I have shown interest in Carleton over the past few months by asking for tons of information and plan on visiting in Sept. or Oct. of my senior year.</p>

<p>That’s all about me, but if you skipped it, you can probably still answer my questions. Here they are</p>

<p>1) Will only having two foreign language classes (Latin) hurt my application very much?</p>

<p>2) If I talk about how I would have liked to have taken more but was unable to due to my schools strange scheduling system in the extra info section of the common app., would that help?</p>

<p>3) Are there other LACs or Universities that I should know about that would look down at my lack of foreign language credits? Here is a list of other schools I’m considering applying to:</p>

<p>Grinnell
Tufts
Macalester
Williams
Beloit
Hendrix
Dartmouth
(this list gets changed frequently so few of these are certain)</p>

<p>Thanks for your help!</p>

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<p>Don’t know the answer to your specific question, but you’re obviously a strong candidate for any school. And if you are smart enough to compile those stats, you don’t need anyone on the net to tell you that.</p>

<p>Not to hijack your thread, but what did you think of summer session at CC?</p>

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<p>It was amazing! One thing that I did get out of it is that the block plan really isn’t for me, but I’m glad I figured that out before I applied. I’m planning on majoring in physics and I felt as though it would be difficult to take on upper-division science courses in three-week stints.</p>

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<p>My daughter will be a freshman at Carleton in the fall. She took Latin through level III and her Junior year in high school. She dropped language her senior year to take two AP sciences. She also was concerned about not having four years of language but decided to follow her passions/interests instead. Carleton does have a language requirement for graduation (4 terms) that you can test out of (if you had enough language in high school). She ended up testing into the third level Latin class, so will only have to take two language classes at Carleton. If language is not your thing, the requirement at the college, is something to consider. </p>

<p>I don’t think the lack of language will be a deal breaker at most of the schools on your list. Williams and Dartmouth might be the most particular. If you go to the schools common data sets (just google it), you can see what their official requirements are (usually three years language, sometimes two). Sometimes they list four years as “recommended.”</p>

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<p>Thanks for the response goe_wally, and I did take a look at the common data sets. I’m so surprised that I’d never heard of those before.</p>

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<p>protestthehero - does sound good that you found out the block plan wasn’t for you, and I could see how putting high level physics in a three week stint could be tough. </p>

<p>Did you get a sense from the regular CC students (not the high school kids) how they like the block plan, or if it seemed to work better for some subjects than others? Or is it not so much the subject as the student…?</p>

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<p>For the most part, they seemed to enjoy it; the block plan really is the reason that many people chose to attend CC.</p>

<p>As for how well it works, I would say it is a combination of the subject and the student. It’s definately well suited for the humanities and especially well suited for the performing arts, but science? Eh…not so much. It still can work for science majors, but I heard more bad things than good from the physics majors that I talked to.</p>

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<p>Did you get any feedback from Bio majors?</p>

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<p>Not really. I was taking a Physics course so I basically only interacted with the Physics students.</p>

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<p>Ya, without any language nonetheless a foreign language, it will be detrimental to your application. They say having X years of math, science, foreign language, etc makes you a competitive applicant. Of course, you can get in without it, but it will be harder.</p>

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<p>What if you made up for it in extra science and math? As in, beyond BC calc and beyond AP Physics and chem</p>

<p>Oh and finishing the english curriculum and moving into independent study</p>

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<p>I logged on to this thread because my younger S is interested in Carleton. He will graduate with only 2 years of language. He replaced it this year with AP Psychology and will replace it senior year with a second AP science course. My older S is a sophomore
bio/chem major at Colorado College. He loves the block plan. He took organic chem in the fall and said that it was a tough 3 1/2 weeks-studying about 8 to 9 hours everyday in addition to a 3 hour class and afternoon labs–but he thinks the block plan is the best way to learn and retain because you immerse yourself in the subject and it is all you think about for 3 1/2 weeks. He would argue that the block plan is especially beneficial in the sciences. He would agree, however, that the block plan is not for everyone.</p>

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<p>Interesting, but I can’t find any record of a team from Oklahoma in the Einstein field for the past four years. OP, were you in FRC or FTC? Or were you merely referring to qualifying for the competition in Atlanta?</p>

<p></p>

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<p>We weren’t on Einstein; I meant finalist for our division. It was FRC though.</p>

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<p>The foreign language matters little. Do you honestly want to go to a school that would deny you admission because of something like that? Anyway the physics department here is great. In my opinion they are one of the best departments at the college.</p>