McCormick Sophomore - Ask me anything!

thatrunnerkid
Wed, 25 Mar 2015 03:35:21 +0000

@dopamine17‌

Engineering classes start first quarter if you’re starting in McCormick. There are opportunities, however, to start a quarter behind in engineering (starting engineering classes in winter of your freshman year) and have absolutely no problem with your academic progress (like me). Some people even start engineering their sophomore years and manage to graduate on time, but that usually means they can’t take any cool humanities/social sciences/etc classes their last three years at NU.

There’s definitely time to search around for which engineering major is right for you when you’re starting out: each of the four introductory Engineering Analysis (EA) classes, which you take as a four-quarter sequence, are taught by professors from different departments (EECS, Civ Env, MechE, and Applied Math), and you have plenty of space to experiment with different majors with your basic engineering classes. However, beware, as some majors (like mine) require a very specific set of basic engineering classes. Changing majors is easy as well, especially freshman year (all you have to do is submit one form that you don’t even have to have anybody but you sign), and I don’t think you even have to declare a major until the end of freshman year, so you have plenty of time to figure things out within engineering.

As for figuring out if McCormick is the right place for you at NU, that’s a bit tougher, but still definitely doable. Starting in Weinberg as I did, after taking some engineering classes winter quarter of my freshman year I had an experience outside McCormick that I could use to compare my experience in McCormick. From that comparison, I was able to figure out what I would have the least regrets doing (a kind of sad way of figuring things out, I’ll admit, but it worked), which happened to be engineering, and I’m really happy with it now. Sorry, that was a lot about me, time to get down to what would happen starting in McCormick and trying to figure things out. As a freshman engineering student, you should be able to take 3 engineering/math classes and 1 non-engineering/math class per quarter. You could compare the math (taught in Weinberg) and other non-engineering classes to the engineering classes, or just see how intellectually engaged and interested you are in the engineering classes, to find out what you want to do. If you don’t feel like that would give you enough of a taste of other schools, talk to an adviser to figure out what you should do.