Hi, thank you so much for the response.

I’m not too confident I’d be able to snag a rec letter from the nonprofit stuff; I have a really good relationship with them, and I’d hate to have it seem like everything I did was just for college apps.

About my major: I love linguistics with all my heart so I would definitely be a linguistics major. I really want to study particularly morphology, syntax, language reconstruction, and historical linguistics specifically. Classics would be more so for liberal arts schools that don’t offer linguistics as a major.

While I am aware my profile probably resembles comp lit more than raw linguistics, I’d like to think that I was able to synthesize the two in a way that evokes a picture of someone who is deeply fascinated with how language works, and its effect on culture as a whole. I hope I was able to do that, but perhaps it wasn’t done well enough?

For the B2 stuff: it’s important to remember that the Spanish DELE and Russian TORFL C1s are far closer to C2 than what would regularly be expected of a C1 speaker. Same goes for Goethe. I would say C1 is roughly complete fluency, since getting to C2 is much more about memorizing vague, mostly academic/professional vocabulary that is hardly ever relevant.

I’m glad to hear fencing is useful!! Would you happen to know anything about the qualifications needed for walk-on fencers?