My final for my last java class will be Monday. What would be a good language with many free sources (poor college student here) to work off of? I've heard good things about Ruby and Erlang but both seem alien to me.
Perhaps there is something I should try in Java first before moving to another language like some kind of framework or libraries that would advice me more than adopting a new language so quickly?
I would definitely recommend Ruby - as a fun language to learn more about programming. Java is statically typed and strictly object oriented, so it is natural that Ruby feels alien to you.
Ruby is strong in a number of paradigms - especially object oriented, functional and metaprogramming. Learning lots of paradigms and how to combine them will make you a better programmer no matter what future languages you use.
Having learnt Java, JRuby would be good implementation of Ruby to use - it is written in Java and runs on the JVM. Another advantage of JRuby is that you can use Java libraries from your Ruby code. Just install jruby from your package manager and you should be ready to go.
To learn ruby check out the following resources: