Dartmouth vs Middlebury vs Bowdoin

Corbett
Thu, 07 Dec 2017 22:18:13 +0000

FWIW, at the time I was paying attention, at my school, the curriculum a first-year engineering student would take was not all that different than what a physics major in its liberal arts college would (or could) take. Therefore switching from one of these to the other after freshman year would not necessarily delay one’s graduation date.

Sure. If you look, for example, at the sample course sequence for Electrical Engineering at Cornell, then EE majors are only expected to take a single introductory “engineering” course during their freshman year. That doesn’t seem like it would be hard to make up.
http://www.ece.cornell.edu/ece/academics/undergraduate/major/samples.cfm

The problem: freshman EE majors are also expected to get two semesters of math, one semester of physics, one semester of chem, and one semester of computer science. And all of those math and science classes are prerequisites before you can start taking more “engineering” classes as a sophomore.

So you can’t really “explore” EE, beyond the single introductory freshman course, unless you take a bunch of other math and science courses as well. Now, if you started out as a math or physics major, then OK, you maybe did take a bunch of math and science courses, so in that case it would likely be feasible to explore EE or even switch majors.

But if you are a typical LAC student, and you didn’t commit to a math/science-intensive schedule as a freshman, then switching to engineering later and still finishing in four years is probably not going to work. At many LACs, you can explore whatever classes you like as a freshman or sophomore, and you don’t declare a specific major until the end of your sophomore year. This is an attractive path for many, but it doesn’t work for the traditional engineering BS.