Stupid question inside about BS and MS degrees

baktrax
Mon, 25 Nov 2013 22:03:43 +0000

This is why I dislike colleges that force 18-year-olds to specify their majors up front, because most of them don’t know and need to do a little exploring before they settle. I think it also discourages switching majors, which is crucial for STEM majors - about 25% of STEM majors switched into the major after they began college.



This is why I tell people to start as an engineering major if they’re even considering it as a possibility. It’s much easier to rule that out and get off the engineering track than it is to decide you want to be an engineer in your second year of college (and still graduate in four years). With a major like engineering, it’s hard to mess around with different majors and still graduate on time. For other science and math majors, it’s much easier to switch around, but with engineering is much harder to do that.

UCSD’s an unfortunate situation because structural engineering JUST got added to the list of impacted majors, and in four years, it’ll probably be off the list again–but that’s too late for you unfortunately =( There are plenty of other schools where engineering isn’t impacted, so you should still have good options to choose from, regardless of what UCSD decides.