Coming into the school as a freshman I never saw myself actually declaring in the Spanish major, even though I knew I wanted to continue taking Spanish classes, it wasn’t something I saw being in my actual degree. I enjoyed my Spanish classes in high school somewhat, but mostly liked that I was continuing to better my reading, writing and speaking skills in the language. It wasn’t until I started taking classes here at UMass that I really began to enjoy the actual contents of my classes and the topics discussed in them. When I finally declared my major at the end of my sophomore year, I had decided to go with linguistics after taking LING 201 but was considering ‘minoring’ in Spanish just because of how many classes I had already taken and the thought of putting them to some use. When I learned of the joint-major program in the linguistics department it opened the possibility for me to continue taking more Spanish classes than I expected, and I do believe that some of the classes I have taken since then have been some of my favorites in the department, some of them being SPAN 322, 323, 471, 378, 397PP among others.

My relationship with the Spanish portion of my major has changed a lot from when I first started here at UMass. It has taken a more rooted interest and enjoyment in learning not just more of the language but of its literature, history, culture, and issues being dealt with within some of these topics. I am glad I continued with Spanish as part of my degree and have all of these different backgrounds and information on these kinds of subjects that relate to the language while growing in my level of proficiency in the language itself.