Applied for CS to Arts & Sciences but accepted into Engineering?

[Mastadon]

The point I was trying to make is that a Tufts CS grad probably has less opportunity to experiment with A&S/humanities than other top CS programs embedded in Engineering schools, because it is ABET accredited. And this is really counter to how they are marketing the school. What if a CS student wanted to minor in Japanese Studies or IR? Probably not possible without taking summer courses.

Minors range from 5-7 courses (with multidisciplinary minors such as Cog Sci being 7) There is no minor in IR because as defined at Tufts, it is extremely multidisciplinary with lots of requirements.

Note that Computer Science has the fewest Engineering requirements of any ABET accredited major at Tufts. It should easily fit any Humanities, Arts, or Social Sciences (HASS) minor. You can use the 1 SS elective, the 1 H elective, the 3 HASS electives and the 2 free electives as well as the 3 breadth electives (i.e. 10 total) toward a minor or second major. For reference, a “single discipline” major typically consists of 10 courses.

Other ABET accredited majors (such as Computer Engineering) are more challenging because they have more requirements and as a result they eliminate the breadth electives to keep the total course count at 38. Minoring in Japanese (or other languages) is made easier by the fact that engineers were considered when designing the language minors.

http://ase.tufts.edu/grall/documents/languageMinorEngineering.pdf

Requiring 1 SS, 1 H and 3 HASS electives forces engineers out of the pure engineering domain. I believe that the number of liberal arts distribution requirements (which includes the “A” in HASS) is somewhat rare in the world of ABET accredited programs. Combining these liberal arts distribution requirements with the 2 free electives facilitates minoring in a liberal arts discipline - even in the more rigorous ABET Engineering majors.

Of course, these requirements have an opportunity cost. You can’t take as many pure engineering courses, which is not the right fit for some aspiring engineers.

Offering fun intro to engineering courses (that fulfill science distrubution requirements for liberal arts students) as well as offering fun interdisciplinary minors (that cross the boundaries of engineering and liberal arts) helps to draw liberal arts students into engineering.

Music and the Art of Engineering is a highly recommended intro engineering course that maps into an area of interest for your daughter

http://engineering.tufts.edu/docs/ES93IntroEngFall2014.pdf

as does the minor in Music Engineering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akgJSzh5mnY

I believe all this consistent with the marketing message…