I'm doing my PhD and do almost everything in C (I don't need to code a lot for my thesis, but for a paper I got in complex dynamics I did a few fractal renderer

I'm doing my PhD and do almost everything in C (I don't need to code a lot for my thesis, but for a paper I got in complex dynamics I did a few fractal renderers that needed to be fast, or at least as fast as I could get them to be). Sadly we can't choose the language as we have 3 courses on programming which are supposed to be C based. If I was to choose, I would pick Lisp... but this is only a dream ;)