Wilson Kneiszel '21 - Languages, Literatures and International Studies

I'm now living in Milwaukee and working (remotely) as a senior software developer. I have had a pretty successful career so far. I'm also getting married in 2 weeks to Brigitte Landreville whom I met at NMU (she took Dr. Ulland's gender studies course in the spring of 2020 and says hi!)

I majored in Spanish and Computer Science while at NMU and I found both programs to be excellent in terms of the coursework and the faculty. I don't think I had a single class or professor in either program that I didn't like. I also completed the lower division honors and found those classes to be fascinating and exposed me to a lot of topics and conversations I otherwise wouldn't have encountered. 

NMU's CS program definitely prepared me for a career in technology and exposed me to all the essential concepts that I work with on a daily basis. It taught me everything I needed to know technically to find success in my career. 

I wish I could say I used my Spanish more often in my daily life or career, but even though my career path doesn't make much/any use of that degree, I'm grateful for all the culture and literature that I got to experience through that program as well as the continuation of my language learning. Learning another language can have such a positive effect in life: it allows you to see things from another perspective and forces you to think about communication on a deeper level. I'm a strong believer in learning just for the sake of personal enrichment and the classes towards the end of the Spanish program were some of the best I took at NMU due to their more discussion-oriented structure. Overall I was very pleased to have a second major in something that didn't just feel like job training-- not that the Computer Science program just felt like job training-- but focused on a number of different subjects: history, literature, geography, sociology, etc. 

I really feel like I got the best of both worlds at NMU with both a STEM and a humanities degree. I'm lucky enough to love computers in a society that seems to value that above most other things, and am happy with my career, but I used college as an opportunity to learn about many other subjects as well. 

Oh, and I got a minor in math. Shout out to Dr. Lawton who made calculus fun. 

A fun fact about majoring in Spanish and Computer Science is that technically I have a Bachelor of Arts degree-- I guess they will call Computer Science an art before they call Spanish a science, which I'd have to agree with. I have not been adversely affected by this but I can imagine automatic hiring software rejecting someone on account of having the wrong type of degree. Oh well; it hasn't happened to me yet anyway.