As college students, it’s sometimes too easy to see classes as checkmarks on a list for graduation and not as opportunities to develop ourselves and our skills. 

A College of Liberal Arts major myself, I know too many students who focused on finishing their foreign language requirements instead of allowing themselves to dive deep into learning that language. While it certainly may have earned them a few extra GPA points, what they lost in return may be even more important. 

Assistant instructor and Ph.D. candidate Ashley Garcia has taught both first-time and heritage Spanish speakers. In her experience teaching both groups of students, she said she believes that they reaped a similar benefit. 

“Someone who speaks more than one language not only has skills that can help them even get paid more at a job, but have even more opportunities at a job,” Garcia said. “(Bilingual students are) the desired employee for many of these companies.” 

In today’s world, knowing a second language is important for many jobs. Being bilingual allows students the ability to communicate without barriers when speaking to people of different languages. 

Still, language classes don’t just confer technical advancement. They also open the door to learning about culture.

Ivana Ash, a linguistics graduate student, studies the documentation, description and concentration of Alaskan native languages. 

“Culture does add an aspect to (language) that brings it to life,” Ash said. “Language captures a lot, not just about the world, (but) how we interact with each other.”

Language facilitates culture. It allows us to communicate with each other, to create traditions, to change them, to pass them down. While culture can be taught separately from language, what is learned will be learned only from a distance. 

Language allows us to fully understand and appreciate culture and one another.

This is especially important for those of us in the Moody College of Communication and COLA. Our future careers are dependent on being understanding and communicative, perhaps more than any other college. Having the skill of a new language changes how we can harness our degrees. It also paves the way for us to become leaders in an increasingly global world. 

I was raised as a white individual in a predominantly Hispanic community. Although I learned some Spanish by proxy, I learned much more by taking four Spanish classes in high school. Before learning more about Spanish, the songs my friends used to listen to were just that — songs. 

Afterwards, they became much more. I realized some were sad, others beautiful. Most importantly, songs became meaningful. Despite knowing what the words meant in English before, they didn’t carry the same weight until I could understand them in their intended language. 

Language requirements may seem unnecessary to some students who view them in terms of the intensive hours and abundant homework. However, if students allow themselves to fully immerse themselves, they might find that it could really benefit them.

When fulfilling course requirements, don’t rob yourself of the opportunity to embrace something that could change your outlook on life.

Ransom is a psychology junior from San Antonio, Texas.