Double majoring in college

nerd855
Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:54:10 +0000

“It depends on the majors. Some majors require a lot of courses (engineering) and some don’t (political science). If you are majoring in something that doesn’t require a lot of courses, then double majoring isn’t too difficult–it just means that you can’t take blowoff courses as electives.”

Not true. They have the same number of required classes, engineering kids just have to take specific classes where as liberal arts kids have more freedom in choosing. For example, if you need 24 credits of upper level courses to graduate from the college, engineering is usually a continuation of a previous course or the upper level courses require calculus/physics/whatever before you can take it where in government you can take politics of japan or sociology of politics or government in comics with less stringent prereqs. It is not so structured but the number of classes you must take is the same.

International studies and Economics would be an example of something easier to double major in. However, if your school is like mine and international relations (if we had a major for that) would be in the business school and economics is in the liberal arts school, you will run into some problems because the business kids have different business core requirements than the liberal arts kids, at my school at least. However if both majors are in the same school then it should be fairly easy to finish in four years with a minimal amount of summer school, depending on how many credits you have to transfer in, if you have any.

Oh and you must make sure that your school even allows double majors. UT Austin’s business school does not allow business majors to double major in two business subjects.

Also, the only place they will really ‘overlap’ is in core requirements. After that when you get into upper level courses you have to take X number of courses that are classified under international relations and X number of courses that are economics. Like for example, You can’t take a class that’s called IR 123: Economics in International Relations and try to use that towards your economic major because your economic classes would be under ECO 123 or whatever. Unless your school has some special policy form request thing you can fill out to count one class for both or if your school allows this, which I dont think mine does.

This is just my experience with my particular school.