I remember the moment I fell in love with Spanish: It was sixth grade and I had just changed schools yet again. My first Spanish teacher’s name was “Julias Siesar” which always made everyone laugh. When I started at this new school the class was already three weeks into a unit on verbs. The first word I learned in Spanish — other than the minimal Spanish my grandmother had learned from my long-deceased abuelo — was “escalar”. I can’t say as I use “escalar” with any degree of regularity but it is the word that started what would become the focus of my high school and college academics.

Throughout high school Spanish was my strongest subject. Language came naturally to me and I received an A every semester. I quickly realized it was easy to love something that didn’t require much effort. By my Sophomore year of college, I was conversationally fluent but something changed between high school and the first few years of higher education: I despised Spanish. All of my classes were in Spanish, all of my homework was in Spanish, and suddenly I found myself tripping over my rr’s and mixing up the pretérito y imperfecto. College also meant that more of my classes had native Spanish speakers and I began to wonder if I had any place pursuing a career in a language billions of other people speak better than me.

I told myself I would drop the major and start over with a new one. I selected Communication Disorders because I love linguistics and Comm-Dis can be summarized as the clinical application of linguistics. I only took one Spanish class the first semester of Junior year. Two months into the semester it became clear a whole world of opportunities exists for bilingual Speech-Language Pathologists.This realization went beyond job opportunities and finances; as a bilingual Speech-Language Pathologist I have something to offer the Spanish-speaking community. Rather than inserting myself y mi acento estadounidense in the Spanish-speaking community and then finding a way to make it work, I can provide a service to those who may not be able to access it otherwise.

I look forward to having the opportunity to help people access healthcare that may otherwise prove difficult to find due to a language barrier. Even though Spanish is, at times, my worst enemy I also look forward to continuing to deepen not only my linguistic understanding of Spanish, but my cultural understanding as well. For anyone reading this post and still hesitant to choose the Spanish major: try it out. It won’t be smooth sailing for all four years but it will be worth it in the end.