Program Options
Spanish Major
As a Spanish Major, you will develop your speaking, listening, and communication skills as a Spanish speaker. You will gain a better understanding of perspectives and experiences of Spanish speaking cultures.
Review Major requirementsSpanish Minor
The Spanish minor requires eighteen hours of electives at the 2000-level or above (excluding Spanish 2030).
Spanish Master of Arts
The department offers Master’s degrees in Spanish on-campus and online. Graduate Assistantships are available to on-campus students.
Linguistics Lab
The Linguistics Lab is located in Hoyt Hall. In the Linguistics Lab, we investigate Spanish language data using different approaches, such as: Corpus Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, and Experiments. For more information, contact the lab director Irene Checa-Garcia.
More Than a Major
We invite students to get involved with Spanish language learning beyond the degree program. The department offers study abroad opportunities, recognized student organizations, and a National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society (Sigma Delta Pi).
Master of Arts in Spanish
Why study with us?
Personal attention. Faculty at most U.S. institutions are fairly similar in terms of their preparation to become teachers. What distinguishes our faculty is the small size of the graduate programs, which allows one-on-one mentorship of graduate students. The intimate scale of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages facilitates access to all faculty, and students really get to know their professors. You may not like the sound of this, but our graduate programs are small enough that most faculty require multiple drafts of term papers. We coach students to success, one office visit and one assignment at a time.
Collegial atmosphere. The ambiance of our graduate programs is relaxed. Graduate programs are stressful by nature, but our M.A. in Spanish reduces the tension by encouraging a friendly ambiance. You’ll find that our Graduate Teaching Assistants spend time together outside of their official duties and develop lifelong friendships among themselves and with their professors. Our programs mix international and U.S. students, and as you can see from the photos on Facebook, they have a great time together.
Dual focus. For graduate students who are also Teaching Assistants, the Department requires a dual focus on pedagogy as well as research. Other programs stress graduate students’ coursework over teaching, but at UW we believe that excellent graduate students should also be excellent instructors. We will never tell you to spend less time preparing your classes, or that teaching doesn’t matter. In fact, we will observe your classes if you invite us and trade teaching tips!
Platform for the Ph.D. We send our M.A. students to some of the best doctoral programs in the U.S. Nothing educates like switching systems, and the change from working with the professors at UW to working with “new” faculty at a Ph.D. program will benefit you in ways that no single program can manage. For students who do not wish to continue with the Ph.D., the range of alternative opportunities is simply too large to list here. We have awarded M.A. degrees to people who went on to become everything from lawyers to dentists, and from school teachers to government workers. The horizons are always wide for Modern and Classical Languages M.A. students.
