An English writing emphasis major with minors in German, Japanese, Women's Studies, and Philosophy, Cheryl will graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater following the Fall 2005 semester.

The southeast Wisconsin resident helped fund her education with $6,000 in scholarships and grants, including: a high school alumni scholarship, grants though her mother's employer, grants through her university's alumni group, and a statewide university study abroad grant and scholarship.

Cheryl is already putting her language skills to work. She has volunteered abroad teaching English at the JTB USA Summer Camp sponsored by Guy Healy Japan in Japan's Osaka prefecture during the summer of 2003, and studied a semester abroad in Bern, Switzerland for her English major in the Spring of 2004. She has also interned as a copyeditor for Auto/Biography Studies, an academic journal based in Whitewater, Wis.

She also belongs to, and takes an active role in, several student organizations, with ‘the list' including: President of The College of Letters and Sciences Dean Advisory Council, Philosophy and English Representative of the same council, Letters & Sciences Student Representative for the University Curriculum Committee, on the Saunders Award Committee, Punk & Ska Music Director for one year at the college radio station, WSUW 91.7 FM The Edge, Marketing Team for WSUW, Music Library Aide for WSUW, On-Air DJ for WSUW, sound system volunteer at the student-run Jitters Coffee House, Senator of the Philosophy Club and founder of its Annual Global Awareness Forums, Women's Center volunteer, and a Golden Key Honors Society general member. She is also a member of: Whitewater United for Peace, German Club, English Club, Creative Writing Group, Russian Literature Reading Group, MASA, UWW Campus Greens, Whitewater Film Society, International Club and Billiards Club, and took part in the German Club's high school invitational events as a volunteer and as a judge.

Four minors, an active student life and participation in study abroad programs have served to offer Cheryl invaluable experiences. Though she will have clocked in five and a half years of undergrad studies by the time she graduates, Cheryl is eager to continue her studies and eventually plans to pursue a master's degree.

I didn't know what I wanted to do when I enrolled in college. I immediately knew I was majoring in Undeclared for a bit. I chose UW-Whitewater because it was the most affordable option for me. I didn't want to go to UW-Madison because I wouldn't get to know any of the professors – the place is just too big. I lucked out by managing to, without much research, enroll in a decent school for languages. They even teach Russian and Arabic here.

It's a funny story, actually. I started to study Japanese because I moved to the Global Village, a residence hall with a lot of international students. I ended up with a roommate from Japan, and I heard her talking to her dad on the phone and thought it sounded pretty.

I enrolled in a Japanese class that was just starting to be offered at Whitewater. As for German, I found out that English majors had one study abroad opportunity through UW-W; it was in Switzerland and required two years of German or French. Since it was located in the German-speaking area of Switzerland, I enrolled in German at the same time that I enrolled in Japanese.

It got to be a little crazy, especially the first semester, because we would learn how to ask what time it was in my Japanese class and then the same thing in German. I kept mixing the languages up so when people asked me what languages I was studying, I said, “Ja-man.”

For the grants and scholarships I made a total of $6,000 for the five years of schooling I have completed. These awards have definitely helped defray the costs. My tuition has been raised 15 to 20 percent annually; it has nearly doubled since I started. This coming semester's tuition alone is $2,500; that doesn't account for any living costs.

The Mary D. Bradford High School Alumni scholarship was $1,000 from my high school, which one of my teachers nominated me; I hadn't even known I was in the running.

The study abroad grants were applications available through the UW system, but the ultimate decision was made for each University from the financial aid office. Since I was early in applying, I had set up the first appointment with financial aid and therefore gained priority for the $2,000 grant and $500 scholarship. I suppose my grades probably helped too...

My mother works for Abbott Laboratories, which offers scholarships to employees and their children. The Clara Abbott Foundation gave me $1,000 dollars two years in a row for my grades. Other students should query their parents to find out if their employers supply any grants or scholarships for college.

I have friends I'd like to keep in contact now from other countries; even though some of them study English, others don't. It would be difficult to keep in contact with them if I didn't keep my languages up to par. There is also an internationally recognized annual fluency exam given in Chicago every December for Japanese, which I plan on taking.

I plan on teaching English in Japan through the JET Programme or some other program after graduating. I would also like to go to graduate school in Switzerland for Interpreting/Translation. Beyond that, my dream job would be doing translation or interpretation for the United Nations. We'll see how that goes though, as I still need to learn French if I want to do that.

One thing I like is all the fun people I meet in my language classes. Foreign language is a popular minor in many fields, so it isn't restricted to a single college at the university. There are Business majors sitting next to Music and Social Work majors. Also, people in language classes tend to want to be there and tend to travel. For example, everyone in my German class last semester had already traveled to a German speaking country. I don't see that happening in my philosophy classes or my English classes.

One thing I dislike about my education is the fact that my language classes have always been back to back or overlapped, which resulted in the year that I took Japanese and wasn't in class because I had to be in German class. I made it alright, but lost valuable practice time for Japanese conversation. I also wish there were summer language courses available.

I think it would be easier to focus on learning a foreign language without having to worry about an advance seminar research paper, for instance.

I will start with Japan because I went there first. In my Japanese class, our professor informed us of a summer volunteer opportunity, so I applied. I didn't have any experience out of the country before that, and was finishing my second semester of Japanese. Pretty much, I could ask where the bathroom was and have a 50% chance of understanding the answer. There were 17 of us teaching at the English camp, sleeping in tents, the rainy season, and one typhoon. It was awesome, although my mom didn't think it was awesome when she heard about the typhoon. I figure that since I managed there, I can make it through any challenge.

The Swiss study abroad was fun and challenging in its own way. This time I was the only one from the U.S., instead of part of a group. I arrived in Bern hoping I'd find my way to my lodging house, and fortunately had insisted/begged that someone meet me at the train station to help me find it and they were there waiting for me. It was a good thing I did too, because my lodging house wasn't even in Bern, it was in Bethlehem.

Bethlehem is what the Swiss consider a ghetto. It was a pretty nice neighborhood actually. There was a forest with hiking trails a block away, there were two grocery stores, a train stop, restaurants, a gas station, a recreation center, a children's library, and a pizza place that had a pet donkey and chicken. I especially liked that a donkey lived in the ghetto. There was a little graffiti but it looked to be intentional, paid-for graffiti with suns and smiling faces, stuff like that.

It was a little bit difficult meeting people since my German wasn't top notch and they speak Swiss-German in Switzerland, which has a different grammar and pronunciation. For example, if you want to say you are going to the bar in German you would say, “Ich gehe zu die Knape” and in Swiss-German it might be, “Ich gehe die Beiz.” Maybe, that is, I never figured out the grammar differences, but Beiz is how you say bar, I learned that right away!

I made some international friends in the first month, and about three months later I made some Swiss friends. I miss them all. It was a lot of fun getting to know everyone and I still keep in contact.

Go for a year if you can, and prepare for the going for at least a year if at all possible. What I mean is that you should study up on the geography, dwelling places, check out the university's web site, talk with the exchange coordinator and learn the language a little. It's okay if you aren't fluent...I still am not! Get the ISIC card and lots of passport size pictures. I had to send so many of those pictures, I lost count, but it may have even been ten.

Also, save up as much money as possible, and try and figure out how much it will cost. To save on your budget, look into flights early. I found out that taking a two-week vacation in Czech Republic, then flying to Switzerland was $400 cheaper than any flight I found that went directly to Switzerland. So that is what I did.

There are lots of student discounts for travel, if you go to Switzerland, there is a Halbtax pass (that means for a year, all train transport is half price) and a Nach Sieben pass (all train transport after 7 p.m. is free).

I wish that I had known I would go into language. I didn't figure out that part until I had already been here for two years. I guess I got caught up in the concern of having a job out of college (with the recession and all). It is kind of funny, UW-Whitewater is known as a business and education university. A lot of people I have met are business majors, and after graduation, they don't have jobs, there is too much competition in their field.

I chose to go into the humanities because I like it, and now I've found out that I actually have a lot of job opportunities because I have unique skills. If someone is going to college, a tech school, or somewhere else, they should know that they are better off doing something they like doing.

If you hear that there is a boom in an occupation just when you are starting college it is too late to go into it if it is something you are doing only for a job. The boom will be over when you graduate.

This is the area where most of my education really was. I learned group work skills, event promotions, event planning, management, fundraising, and organizational skills along with a lot more. I also learned about the procedures involved for booking rooms, tables, speakers and other event needs.

To be honest, I put most of my time into philosophy club as I have been involved in administration of philosophy club for four years, including facilitating revising the constitution, leading several discussion groups, booking most of the monthly speakers, putting up thousands of flyers, organizing bookmark sales, bake sales, candy bar sales, and pitching the SUFFAC committee to get the philosophy club university funding.

I helped change the club's organizational structure, and have trained other senators on what we do. The club was initially run by a president, and we shifted to having two people running it with other administrative positions such as marketing, fundraising, secretary, etc. When I went into the position as co-runner, I changed it to become senators of equal power. This way, we could all gain experience from all areas of the previous sectioned off positions and it was a lot more open to newcomers that wanted to gain some leadership skills. I am also putting together a club binder with information on school policies for events, how we've booked speakers in the past, movies we've watched, how we put together the Annual Global Awareness Forum, how we've gained members in the past and so on. It was through involvement in this club that I ended up President of The College of Letters and Sciences Dean Advisory Council for a year (I went to Switzerland and therefore was no longer president afterwards, but I am still on the Council doing double representation).

The clubs that I am in aside from philosophy club have also been very important; I just don't dedicate as much time to them. Philosophy club has been like an extra three credit class for the last four years!

I would encourage anyone to get involved in organizations, and I would recommend that they scope them out before giving membership fees (we don't have them with philosophy club). Some clubs are only there as a resume builder, there no fun and very demanding. They'll even have point systems and require you attend certain events so that you don't lose points and that if you don't have enough points they can kick you out. I would recommend that any club/organization/professional organization someone is thinking of being involved in be for the purpose of it being interesting to him or her. It is a good way to meet people in a university the size of a city.

Most universities have exams that you can take to test out of language courses. I took one when I returned from Switzerland and skipped a semester of German because of it. These exams aren't very expensive, I think I paid $20, and they are usually available through the registrar's office of the university.

First off, if a prospective student knows they are going to specialize in a certain language, I would recommend that they attend a school in a country that speaks the language as the ideal. Other than that, you can go to the university web sites and find out about faculty of the language or field they are studying. You can get their names and information on their background. Once you have their names, you can also search for them in student survey web sites (the only one I can think of offhand is myprofessorsucks.com) to see if how many students have reported on them.

A lot of schools don't have huge language programs, which is a good and bad. It can be difficult if you clash with the professor, but it is nice to have the same professor for language classes since they know what you have already studied. I've had three different professors in the three years I have studied German, and we are having another new one start for my final semester of German. They don't have a clue what we've gone over, and it should be interesting! On the other hand, for Japanese, I had the same professor for three years and because of it, I feel that I have a much better idea on how to study for Japanese and a better grasp of the grammar.

Go for it and join the language club pertaining to the language studied. If you want to major in French, join French club. They will have French conversation times, can help find you tutors (you will probably need to go to tutoring if you study a foreign language), and meet people who have similar interests as yourself.

My ideal career choice is to be a translator/interpreter. This, of course, requires at least a master's degree, so I'll see how that goes. For now, I intend to go to Japan and teach English for a couple years, while doing some research on graduate schools for translation/interpretation. At the moment I am vying for going back to Switzerland for my graduate degree.

My interest in languages began kind of randomly as I said before. My Japanese roommate's mother tongue just sounded cool and when I began to study Japanese, I had so much fun. I even got to feel artistic drawing the characters, and it was very meditative. It wasn't something I just picked up on, but I have always enjoyed studying Japanese.

As for German, my grammar book has met the wall a couple of times but I have come to enjoy German as well.

I've studied abroad in a German-speaking country, and I've volunteered in Japan. I have friends in both countries and I have done a lot of research. I have talked with people who have or have known people that have done what I am trying to do (the teach English in Japan part) and checked out the prerequisites for getting into Swiss graduate schools as an international student.

I would guess Spanish and Chinese. There is an increasing need to address that the U.S. does not have a national language, and that there are several fields that deal with people where English is a second language. Whether at the hospital getting care or as a lawyer, I think Spanish is important. As for Chinese, they just opened their market, so in the business world I would assume Chinese would be important, but I don't know how long that will be the case. It is a cool language, fun characters in that one too.

UNESCO has several internships for translation/interpretation; unfortunately you have to be a graduate student. There are internships abroad available though. A friend of mine worked at a study abroad office in Kassel, Germany, for a summer and she had a wonderful time and even got paid for it.

As opposed to internships, I think that there are a lot more volunteer programs and study abroad opportunities available for undergrads; as an undergraduate, you are still trying to get to that intermediate level of language knowledge. Depending on how large of a city your university, there may be ESL tutoring opportunities, and there are plenty of other tutoring opportunities which would be language applicable.

When I am helping people communicate with each other that otherwise wouldn't. That is a fulfilling feeling. When I was translating into English for someone who didn't know German in Switzerland, I felt like I was actually helping. Also in Japan, noticing the progress in a camp session with the campers was awesome. When they tried to initiate conversation where they were too nervous to do so before, that was also a great feeling.

I don't really have any. I am doing this because I enjoy language, culture and people.

I was able to understand directions to the university and to say “I am lost” in Japan in downtown Osaka. Learning the language and meeting people also learning it has helped me persevere in studying.

Personally, I would like to be fluent in German and Japanese; I am at an intermediate level currently. I would like to be able to write and read the combinations of 2000 kanji or Chinese characters and I would like to learn a lot more languages. Next on my list is French. As for professional goals, my dream job would be working for the UN as a translator/interpreter.

In the language field, I would say it is important but not essential. Someone may well grow up in a bilingual setting, be fluent in two languages and not be passionate. It may just be a part of life for them, and they are competent.