<p>Many graduate programs in engineering are willing to admit non-engineers in a remedial status. Then you might spend your first year catching up on undergraduate engineering courses before you start the graduate curriculum. The bad news is that Master’s programs in engineering are not always funded. Your odds for funding are much better if you apply to PhD programs. A senior physics major friend of mine is pursuing this route right now. </p>
<p>Taking engineering classes at Swarthmore is not very practical. Here’s an example. Suppose you wanted to take Mechanics, the first course in the engineering sequence. It meets MWF 8:30-9:30 with a lab on M or W from 1:15-2:30. You would take the 7:10 van to Swarthmore and come back to Haverford at 4:35. (You’d probably spend the 4-hour block between class and lab at Swarthmore because you would only have 1 hour at Haverford if you chose to come back in between.) That basically means that you would not be able to take a single class at Haverford on MWF. </p>
<p>Trying to fit three classes into TTh is tricky enough as it is. The real problem is that most of the lower-level math and science classes at Haverford are scheduled on MWFs (when engineering meets at Swarthmore), while they are scheduled on TTh at Swarthmore (so you cannot take them in the 4-hour break between your engineering classes). That means that you would not be able to start the engineering sequence until your 3rd year in college, and you will be facing similar scheduling conflicts throughout your college career. Most students don’t take classes at Swarthmore at all because they are extremely inconvenient scheduling-wise.</p>
<p>Haverford is a great liberal arts college. If you want a broad liberal arts education and maybe go into engineering later, there are ways to make that happen. But if you want to study engineering at the undergraduate level, I promise you that you will be miserable at Haverford.</p>
<p>I hate to be a Debbie Downer but it had to be said.</p>