Heh, I took Swedish at UIUC for the same reason. If you really want
to learn Finnish though, look up Professor Hock as he has a number
of books on it and is interested in the language (although he doesn't
speak it as far as I know).
If they still have the Scandinavian Table, go and see if there are
any Finns there. We used to have inane conversations there since
the Swedish teacher understood spoken Finnish, but couldn't say anything in it, so she would talk to us in Swedish and we would answer in
Finnish
As for learning Swedish, it's handy, but you're not going to get by
with it except for along the western coast and in the islands out that way.
The Swedish spoken here is quite different from what is spoken in
Sweden and many dialects of Finnish Swedish aren't even intelligible
to other Finnish Swedish speakers.
-enk