My friend, Evan from work has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Duke University. He will be marrying another Ph.D. Electrical Engineering student from Duke in a couple of months. She is hispanic and going through Duke on a fellowship she received through the Department of Defense. Her undergraduate degree is in Physics. Evan and I talked yesterday about educational choices for students entering their undergraduate education with an eye to going on to get a Ph.D. He made the very good point that, if you want to study humanities it matters a lot more where you get your undergraduate degree than if you study engineering or one of the hard sciences. If you want to get into Harvard to study sociology, psychology, education, or archeology, it is pretty hard if you get your Bachelors Degree from Southern Oregon Universtiy or Linfield. On the other hand, if you get an engineering or hard science degree with good grades from a school like Washington State, Oregon State, or North Carolina State, do well on the GRE, and have the added bonus of being hispanic, you can get into places like MIT, Stanford, and Princeton and even get good assistantships and/or fellowships.
While we were talking about that, I mentioned that Kelly was a big fan of Condoleeza Rice, who went to good schools at a young age, played Mozart with the Denver Symphony when she was 15 and accompanied Yo-Yo Ma in a concert at Constituion Hall, etc., etc. We looked here up on Wikipedia and found that she speaks Russian, German, French, and Spanish in addition to English. That got me to thinking about the kids language education.
They are going to finish their second year of Rosetta Stone Spanish next year. Both of them speak Spanish quite well at least partially because we speak it at home. When they finish with that second year, our plan is to start them on more intense grammar work from textbooks in addition to third year Rosetta Stone Spanish at a slower pace. The textbook work is partly to prepare them for the CLEP Spanish Exam, but also to provide them with a better working ability to read and write Spanish rather than to just speak and understand spoken Spanish. At the same time, I want to start both of the kids on a third language. We have assumed that should be French for a number of years now, but I am not sure that would be a good choice.
The kids speak a romance language and a germanic language. It very well might be better for them to get a language from a third language family. Lots of people suggest Mandarin. I think Russian would be a good option, too. Comments?