I applied for Linguistics a few years ago. More specifically: Portuguese/English. I'm from Brazil, so Portuguese is my first language and my second is English.
I wanted to follow this career because my original intention was to become a translator. I successfully went as far as the last college semester and passed in every discipline. ...Except for internship.
And that's the ONLY reason I could not obtain my diploma. I don't know how things are for you guys, but in my country you have to successfully complete 300 hours of internship as a Portuguese/English teacher trainee in order to graduate (as well as passing in every discipline, of course). Sounds like a lot of time, right? But that's not the main problem.
Imagine yourself trying (and failing miserably) to teach in a classroom filled with 40~50 irritating brats that are unable to hold a civil conversation/listen to you and only keep shouting non-stop through the class. Yes, that's how things went for me. It didn't help the fact I'm introverted/quiet/clumsy/socially inept/autistic/etc, so I was unable to "tame" the little devils. To put short: I was a complete failure at internship. So much that it costed my diploma.
I was pretty good, however, in the actual college classes. Despite my lazy attitude, I'd always get good grades even without studying at all. At most I'd only grab the books and study them for a couple hours before the start of every test.
...To be honest, I never actually enjoyed Linguistics that much and only applied for it because I was naturally good at Portuguese, plus already knew how to read English (learned it from playing too many RPG's). I thought I'd have an easy time following the career, and it turned out I was right. (...Except for the internship part that killed me)
If you're interested, here is my [URL=
http://i.imgur.com/cNctfyP.png]school card/college report/whatever[/URL]. We call it "boletim" here. (It's still archived on my university's official website). That's how things work: You have two tests for each discipline every semester - "A1" and "A2". The grade you get on each test ranges from 0.0 to 10.0. If the average between A1 and A2 is ≥7.0, then you're approved. If it's lower than that, that means you've failed. You're still, however, able to make an extra test called "A3" should you fail to meet the approval requirements. The average will now reflect A1, A2 and A3 - and it must be ≥5.0. As you can see from my boletim, I only failed in some internship disciplines (the ones saying ESTÁGIO SUPERVISIONADO).
Anyway... I guess that's it. I just wanted to share my own experiences on this thread. I'm sorry if it turned out a little too lengthy... ^^;
I still retain some of the Linguistics knowledge I learned back then. So if you guys have any questions, feel free to ask me and I'll try my best to help. ^.^
