Non-major related science courses as an engineering major

ucbalumnus
Sat, 29 Dec 2012 20:02:31 +0000

There are several types of electives in an engineering degree program:

a. Free electives. You can take any courses you want for the needed credit units.

b. Breadth electives. For engineering majors, this means humanities and social studies courses.

c. Technical electives. This means science or engineering courses of your choosing. There may be subcategories of technical electives (e.g. science elective, engineering elective, etc.) depending on the degree program.

Check the degree program requirements carefully to figure out how many of which kind of electives you have.

AP or college credit that you go in with that gets you out of introductory courses can open up space for additional free electives in your schedule. However, if the courses you are considering skipping are important prerequisites to other courses (e.g. math, physics), review the college’s final exams for those courses to make sure that you know everything that the college expects you to know (if you are only missing small parts of the course, you may need to self-study the missing parts; if you are missing large parts of the course, or find the college’s course to be much more difficult than your AP course, you may want to retake the course).