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. Continue reading →