How to prepare academically for working with PIE?

I am a classics undergraduate, but in my postgraduate studies I would like to
move on to PIE, especially issues of morphology and syntax. However, is it
still acceptable for people to approach PIE from a classics background?
Szemerenyi, in his _Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics_, writes:

"Anyone who wishes to become familiar with the problems of the Indo-European
languages and work in this field will need to start with a basic equipment of
Latin, Greek, Old Indic, and Gothic, and in the course of time to add further
important languages such as Hittite, Old Church Slavic, etc."

However, Szemerenyi is from an much older generation, for his heyday was the
1950's and 1960's. I get the impression that today most people interested in
PIE have little interest in classics, and spend their undergraduate time on
matters of general linguistic theory with but a smattering of Latin and Greek.
Do you think that I would be crippling my academic future by studying classics
first without undergraduate training in linguistics?

(I hope that asking for career advice is permissible here. I posted this query
on sci.lang, but not a single response came. The newsgroup does seem to have
gone downhill in the past year...)

In any event, I guess I should get started with Gothic. That's the one
language in Sz's basic list that I haven't looked over yet.

Christopher Culver