Change of Plans

It looks like I won't be able to go to Guatemala this spring as I'd planned. I'm still planning to go next fall, but for the time being I'm now faced with figuring out what I'm going to do at the U of A this spring.

I'm definitely dropping the English major down to a minor. It seems like that's a classic undergrad move, and admittedly while I plan to shift to a degree that doesn't require a minor (BS in Information Sciences and Technology) I'm also experiencing a proliferation of minors. My reasoning for this is simply a matter of "might as wells." Latin American Studies? Might a well! I'll complete that minor using only my lower-division Spanish credits and the credit I'll earn in Guatemala. Seems silly not to do it, right? And then there's English. At the end of this semester I'll have 15 upper-division credits in the English department and I'll only need 21 to get the minor. What's more, both Technical Writing and Linguistics have proven to be relevant to the IST degree anyway, especially linguistics. In fact, if I didn't have this sunk cost of 15 ENGL credits, I'd probably rather turn it into a Linguistics minor. That said, I'm pretty sure I can find two interesting and relevant classes SOMEWHERE in the English department.

My Linguistics class (Structure and Meaning of Words) is such an interesting class. When I got into it, I only had a foggy idea of what the field of Linguistics was all about. And I was actually hoping to gloss over things like phonology and human vocal anatomy so that we could get to language history. But it turns out even the aspects I thought would be sheer drudgery are fascinating. But then again, I have a tendency to be seduced by interesting classes and left wondering if I should be studying more of that field. It happened with logic, philosophy, astronomy, and now linguistics. At the very least, I'm going to try to find some more cross-listed courses between the English and Linguistics departments so that I can make the two remaining classes for an English minor as full of linguistics as possible.

Then I need to get another math out of the way. Hopefully I can do that over break at the community college. Pre-Calc I think it is? I need to send out some emails to advisors today.