Penn State or UW-Madison?

happymomof1
Sun, 28 Apr 2013 09:23:46 +0000

“which state is more likely to accept an international as a professional worker there”

State has nothing to do with this. As an international student, you are strictly limited in where you can work and how much you can work. Contact the international student offices on each campus and ask about CPT (work you can do during the school year) and OPT (work you can do after graduating) placement. If you do not find an employer that will complete the H-1B visa process for you by the time your OPT expires, you will have to leave the US. Period. There are many, many, many US biology and biotech students right now. It will be all but impossible for you to find a permanent job here with only a bachelor’s degree in that field, in fact, it will be almost impossible with a master’s degree. If you have a PhD and several years of post-doc research experience, then maybe. But even then it is not certain.

UW- Madison is a terrific university with strong programs in the bio-sciences. If it is no more expensive than Penn State, I’d encourage you to take a careful look at it.

When you complete a double-major, you do indeed fulfill the graduation requirements for both fields of study. Read the requirements for both majors very carefully to see how much duplication there is in the two programs, and to determine whether or not the required subjects for one major can be used as elective subjects for the other. It can be very easy to double-major in two sub-fields of biology, or in biology and chemistry. What is more difficult is if the two major fields are offered in two different colleges within the university. Sometimes that simply isn’t possible to do because the graduation requirements for the two different colleges are so different or because the course sequences have little relationship, or because the two different colleges have very different admissions criteria.