ramaswami

My S will be starting at SEAS in a few weeks. He has no definite interest in any branch of engineering right now. I notice that he has to choose a major by third semester. Is it possible to defer engineering specialization altogether until graduate school?

I know of so many Asians who were compelled into math/sci by their parents, won HS science prizes, went to IIT (in India) or MIT, CMU etc and were disillusioned/unhappy/burned out by late 20s. My wife and I are into liberal arts and have encouraged him to have a broad education. For example, in HS, he did French and Latin to AP Lit levels, 2 history courses to AP, all the math science courses, plus Art Hist at a college etc.

Since he is undecided I am recommending that he take a wide array of engineering/math/science/humanities/Core requirements, have an intellectual feast, and defer a specialization. I know he will have to commit to a major. But what major or coursework would allow him to have maximum flexibility? In other words, what courses/major would prepare him to opt for EE, ME, CS, at graduate level? I do understand that he will definitely be behind a student who has a specific undergrad major in EE, for example. He will have to spend one or two years in catch-up. That to me is preferable to a premature specialization.

I also notice that engineering specialties/majors have ABET requirements that make the program restrictive. How can he avoid it? Is there a program or coursework or major in SEAS which will allow maximum flexibility in choosing a wide array of courses and yet leave one tolerably prepared to go into one of the engineering majors at graduate level?

I hope I have phrased my dilemma properly. Thanks for your input.

Skraylor

Columbia, unlike Yale and a few others, doesn't allow students to graduate without the ABET accredidation. Personally I liked this when applying but I guess I could see how it might be annoying to some...There are a few different avenues he could take tho.

Like Denz has said, AP/AM is a viable choice with fewer reqs than, say, EE or BME. Any of the IEOR majors are pretty much the same as far as reqs go and they tend to be seen as the glorified business major of the eng. school. I was also just looking at the website and found a major I didnt even know existed: Engineering Mechanics (under the CivilE dept). Any of these majors would allow for a fairly wide array of nontech classes to be taken.*

*Note: With the exceptions of AP and AM, none of these majors really need advanced placement to be able to take a bunch of extra classes. For example, Eng.Mechanics only needs 1 sem of chemistry anyways, doesn't matter if it's regular, intensive, or freshman orgo. Summer classes after freshman year will free up even more classes tho. I have a friend who took calc4 and a physics lab during the summer (at U.Mich AA i think) and Columbia is counting both.

Your other option is to get him to apply to a 3-2 or 4-1 program. This entails paying for a 5th year but you get to major in an eng. and a lib.art. Heck, if you pick one of the eng's above and do summer classes along with a 5 year program, you could probably double major and minor if not tripple major (if you carefully planned your classes and had enough overlap).

ramaswami

Good points. Is it common to take classes during the summer? He has had a good liberal arts background in HS so is not inclined to the 4-1 program, etc. I was thinking more in terms of taking the sci/engineering equivalent of a liberal arts curriculum so instead of languages, history, English, econ, pol sci this would be astronomy, biology, CS, physics, real analysis, etc, ie a broad education in the sciences.

Going back to the summer school issue: is it incl in the tuition or does one have to pay? Also, from your mention, courses taken elsewhere would count, right? He has a bunch of AP credits coming in, so if he goes off to Cambridge England to study physics or math in the summer or astronomy would it count at Columbia?