In order to graduate at Blackburn College, students are required to either complete the basic series of foreign language courses or have a minor. Students who take the foreign language route only have to take four classes in Spanish, while Spanish minors have to take seven. With the foreign language option, students gain the ability to speak Spanish well enough but making it a minor can cause a student to go from a well-enough speaker to a fluent speaker.
Spanish professor Timothy Wilson has been teaching for 25 years and his graduates are now in careers where they utilize their Spanish skills regularly. Out of 153 of his Spanish minor graduates from Blackburn and previous colleges he’s taught at, 25 are now teaching in K-12 schools, 24 are working in retail and 19 are working with or for law enforcement agencies. Wilson reported that the most common majors to be paired with a Spanish minor “are biology for students that want to be doctors or nurses, criminal justice and psychology.”
According to the Pew Research Center, “Spanish is, by far, the most spoken non-English language in the U.S.” which makes it a great skill to have in the workforce. Wilson said, “Any profession in which people are working with the public, people want to have Spanish because it makes you twice as likely to get hired and often there’s a different pay scale.” College graduates with a bachelor’s degree have an unemployment rate of 2.5 percent, which is almost half the average unemployment rate, according to a February 2017 study by the Department of Labor.
This bilingual skill can also be developed by actually living in a Spanish-speaking country through a study abroad program. Senior April Goodwin-Duran is a biology major who, because of her Spanish minor, was able to study abroad in Chile last semester. “It made it so much easier to listen, understand and respond at the same time,” Goodwin-Duran said.
“I was a dual major,” Goodwin-Duran said, “and then I thought I wanted to get out of here quicker so I changed it to a minor.” Even with changing it to a minor, Goodwin-Duran now speaks Spanish fluently and plans to use it to advance her career. She took Spanish at Palmyra Middle School and during her first three years at Carlinville High School. Now in her senior year of college, Duran plans on being a nurse after she graduates. “I do plan on doing travel nursing, so [Spanish] opens up a lot of different places in other countries for me to work there and help out,” she said.
Blackburn’s Spanish department chair