Thanks - I just opened a thread to delve deeper into my confusion.
Thanks - and thanks to OP for a fascinating topic.
Iām not really sure how this question connects to what Iām asking, although Iād be interested to discuss it on another thread. Itās a great question.
At this point, the decisions weāre making are athletic, not academic.
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I see - well I did set it up and perhaps I donāt fully understand then - but thatās ok. Hopefully youāve gotten a lot of what you need from the thread thus far.
Thank you! We could check out Princeton.
In case anyone is like me and couldnāt find it at first, hereās the spin off thread:
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Another school to consider looking at is Lafayette. They are D1 for some sports, donāt limit choices of major for their athletes, and has a different feel than many of the other schools suggested on this list. We have a friend with a child there now who is having a great experience (and playing his sport).
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Lafayette is a great choice in that regard. The Patriot League is a good midpoint.
(And frankly, with the Big10 now being throughout the whole country it must be terrible for athletes due to constant long distance travel).
While Iām sure anyone can think of a D1 athlete who managed to major in Engineering, these remain uncommon, even at D1 universities where coaches donāt control their playersā majors. The numbers UCBalum listed indicated about 0.5% - so 99.5% arenāt, not odds Iād play for a 14yo.
I remember there had been a review of UNC athletes and they all clustered in a few majors (I remember Exercise&Sport Science, Sociology, African American Studies being prominent.) I know that at some schools Business can be a common choice. At Penn State thereās a major specifically for varsity golf players. Again, Iām talking about traditional D1 universities.
Engineering at other types of universities, from Lafayette to WPI, is likely to be much more welcoming and could direct some early college tours to figure out what matters or not.
A good way to know for sure would be to ask each university under possible consideration
- a list of majors with how many players in the sports under consideration were in each, over 10 years
- for this year, all athletes currently enrolled, top 5 (or top 10) majors
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Definitely. Ask the UCLA womenās volleyball team how travel went last fall 2024 season. Also noting that conference play is not spread out over the season, but condensed into a time frame quite a bit shorter than the length of the full season!
True. Clemson coaches (even football and basketball) had no issue with players being engineering majors, but hardly anyone does it. Clemson coaches do generally not want/allow nursing and education majors (which is also true elsewhere due to clinicals and student teaching requirements.)
This would be so helpful, but Iāve never seen it!
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Some colleges have student athlete profiles on their athletic web sites. These may list their academic majors. So for such colleges, you can figure out what majors are more or less common.
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True. But those sites can be outdated, not to mention at schools where one doesnāt declare a major until end of soph year the listed frosh/soph majors are meaningless. As always, the best source to find out what majors are āallowedā and/or what majors players are pursuing is the coach.
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Asking any person who may be in a position to know (admission rep, assistant coach, team comm/PR officeā¦) should yield some usable data even if the answers arenāt readily available publicly. It may help OP see what colleges are worth visiting within the parameters of more hands on/more theoretical (or Calc&physics first, Engineering second).
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I agree that those discussions, as well as reviewing rosters, etc., can be helpful. And of course discussing with the coach and team members.
But one challenge is that itās tough to know how many team members wanted to major in engineering but couldnāt or didnāt. I know of teams where it was certainly possible and the coach was fine with it, but it wasnāt common. My sense is that the distribution of aspiring engineering majors across a class or university is not always duplicated within any given roster, for whatever reason.
OP- some of the things that make this combination easier: accumulating AP/IB/dual credit in HS to avoid some of the lab heavy intro courses such as physics, etc,; using the off season, including summers, to schedule courses that might have schedule conflicts; attending a school with ample course availability to avoid situations where the athlete must take one course offered at only one time in a given year.
Those might be things to consider as youāre looking across this spectrum. Some programs might be less rigid than others about those things, especially if a project-based approach requires moving through a set schedule of unique courses without much scheduling flexibility.
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This can depend on whether the sport season overlaps one academic term or more. Also, whether the school is on the quarter or semester system matters. A fall-only sport overlaps half of the academic year on semesters, but usually only a third on quarters. But a spring-only sport overlaps two thirds of the academic year on quarters.
Summer terms may have reduced availability of courses, particularly specialized or upper level courses.
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Lafayette seems like a great option. Like many of the small schools that are coming up here, it has one of the two sports. Always the same one.
Thatās what I am trying to figure out. Right now he is playing Sport A. He canāt play Sport A at WPI or Lafayette or Rose Hulman or . . . So, if thatās what he wants, that broad category of schools then that is one factor in favor of him switching.
On the other hand as people are pointing out, there is another category of schools where he likely canāt play either sport, because they donāt have either or they have one or both but at an intensity level that doesnāt work well with engineering. If thatās what he wants, then he might choose to play both at a lower level that probably wonāt lead to recruitment.
So, Iād like for both of us to see some examples of different types of school.
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Thank you so much! I would love to hear more about WPI. It sounds like such a special place. Anything you could share here or in a private message I would be grateful!
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Iām happy to talk about WPI, itās been a great place for my guy. 
So as I mentioned above, heās a CivE and MechE double major. There arenāt as many Civil people as there are Mechanical, I think because MechE tends to pay more and have āsexierā career prospects than CivE. That hasnāt been a problem at school - heās had a wide variety of good professors and no issue with getting classes, but he has noted that not as many of his upperclassmen friends are CivE majors so there are fewer people to bounce ideas off of.
It is very project based. His freshman year he took a two term course called āpower the worldā taught by a physics/renewable energy prof and a different area prof. The first term they learned about the global energy issues and needs, what people are doing to alleviate that and what works and why. The second term they were in project groups and had to identify a problem and present a project - his team won the campus wide competition for Green Energy Initiatives that year (came with a certificate and some $). There are a wide variety of these two term freshman year project opportunities, that usually will knock out one lower level general science and one of the social science requirements.
And speaking of the seven week terms, weāve found this to be a good fit for him. He has ADHD and I was worried about the fast pace. But itās worked out really really well for him. By only having three courses (instead of five at a typical college) to focus on, he doesnāt have to try to balance as many things or spend as much energy on how to triage. It does move very quickly, but classes meet more frequently than they might in a full semester college. This also works well for him / his ADHD. It means that he KNOWS the class is coming up the next day and there is no fooling yourself into thinking you can procrastinate on something, you canāt.
He did a D3 sport his freshman year (rowing) and was able to balance the time commitment of the sport and the courses and still get very good grades. His peers on the team had some people who were doing multiple different activities, but that was a bit of an exception. He ultimately stopped rowing, because he wanted to give more time to high powered rocketry and his fraternity and to just have time to be social. While the coaches are very understanding of courses and getting work done (and clearly prioritize that) he wanted more downtime than you can find while doing a D3 sport. Instead now he coaches intramural soccer and plays club rugby. But in terms of sports and coaches generally - there are no classes in the afternoon - I forget what the time period is - but there is a specific time band when they expect students will be at practice or clubs or whatever, so there should never be conflicts with labs and practice (may be different for grad level courses).
Junior year you do an IQP project, which is a full term long and most of them are abroad. The project may not necessarily relate to your major. Right now my son is doing his project in Greece. Their project involves supporting a pomegranate farm where the workers are people recovering from addiction. The non-profit that runs it needed some help figuring out a case management system and some way of managing and reporting on their data - both for the business and human outcomes, and they were looking for help with finding areas for efficiencies. That has nothing to do with Civil or Mechanical engineering, but he and his partner-colleagues from WPI are learning a lot about project management, how to talk to a client and learn about their needs, and how to address concerns and deliver a project. Plus heās spending seven weeks in Greece - and study abroad is generally very hard for engineering students, given the requirements of the major.
Heās had an overall great experience with his classes, his classmates, and the opportunities available to him. While WPI students donāt typically do co-ops, the projects you can do throughout the classes are things that show a good level of real world work that has been marketable. He got a great CivE internship after his sophomore year, and has an interesting looking MechE internship lined up for this summer. (Summer after his freshman year he took an extra class - because he went with the crew team to compete in London, he didnāt get home for the summer until the start of July, which didnāt give him time for a summer job.)
The biggest downsides of the school are: (1) the food. The food is not good. Itās edible, but thatās pretty much the best thing I can say about it. They claim they are improving it every year, and maybe thatās true. He moved off campus after his freshman year and sophomore and junior year he packed his lunch and made dinner or ate at the fraternity house. and (2) the gender split. When he was applying there were more women. There was a generous benefactor who gave scholarship money specifically devoted to female students. That person died, her estate didnāt continue the donations, and with fewer big money scholarships for the small cadre of female applicants, WPI had a harder time pulling in women then it did in the past. Itās not the worst of the STEM schools, but when he applied it was something like 55:45 and now itās closer to 70:30 I think. (That could be something to investigate.)
Iām happy to answer any questions you have, just let me know. Weāre huge fans of the school. My son was also accepted to Case Western, RPI, Lehigh, Purdue, Pitt, and URI but ultimately decided on WPI,
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WPI has a great summer camp, but Iām guessing he wonāt be available for it due to his sports schedule .
Nationally only 22% of engineering majors are women - at least last time I checked. So, all of the engineering focused colleges have this same problem with gender splits.
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I think the difference between a college that is predominantly engineering like WPI, and one like Lafayette or a state flagship they has a variety of majors is another dimension to explore.
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Absolutely, that makes a big difference. My guy wanted something snall so he could do his sport - at a D1 school he would have likely not made the team.