The Technician

Issue date: 3/2/10 Section: Opinion

In today's economy, increasing your employability is crucial to being successful. Any additional skills are a value to a potential employer and will set you ahead of everybody else. Kettering University will be offering a great opportunity to add more value to your degree. Starting in summer term 2010, the university will be establishing its first foreign language program.

Taking a foreign language at Kettering will have its pros and cons. In today's growing global market, companies are looking for bilingual individuals with talent pertinent to their business. Today's companies have offices all over the world. Customer relations suffer because of a language barrier and even more importantly inter-company communication is slow and ineffective. Understanding multiple languages opens up a whole world of opportunity for employment and self improvement. The push for this program comes from a positive response to a sampling of students over the recent past term. The results showed interest by the student body for a language program. Although the program will start as a trial run to gauge actual interest within the student body, it has the potential to grow into a full blown program. The program is being put into motion by Luchen Li, who runs the international office and Karen Wilkinson, head of the liberal arts department. The program is geared to prepare students for study abroad. Conveniently, study abroad opportunities exist in Germany and China. The first classes offered will be in German and Chinese, both at an introductory level. After the first term, if sufficient student interest is expressed, the program will be expanded to include a second course in both languages. Wilkinson says that other languages such as Spanish could also be offered at some time in the future. While the schools which support the study abroad program offer a supplemental language course which will help in the day to day living in a foreign county, exposure prior to going will help tremendously. While Kettering employs many instructors who speak a foreign language, the program will be taught by guest instructors who are currently teaching at the University of Michigan - Flint. The instructors would be part time and teaching only these classes. The scheduling of the courses is designed to integrate smoothly with the other courses that the university is offering. Both classes will occur at night to reduce conflict with other courses. German will be offered four times a week in one hour class periods while Chinese will take place twice a week in two hour blocks. Both classes will be four credit hours, explains Wilkinson.

Kettering produces very employable and capable individuals. With emphasis being put on being as employable as possible throughout the experience at Kettering, the university should implement a requirement for a foreign language. Unfortunately at this time, a Bachelor of Science degree does have a foreign language requirement. This means that any credit earned from one of the foreign language classes will be counted toward a free elective. There should be a push toward getting a larger amount of liberal arts classes integrated into a Bachelor of Science degree. Companies today are looking for very highly skilled and well-rounded people. At a university such as Kettering where liberal arts is not highly supported or encouraged, the communication skills of graduates fall behind other schools with many liberal arts classes as part of the core degree. This fallback shows in the field and makes it harder to stay competitive with grads from other schools.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools