I see some schools offer both BS and BA degrees in engineering. What kind of positions can you take if you graduate with a BA degree instead of a BS?
Which schools are those? Ive never seen any.
BA in CS, yes.
Brown and Rice have them. Not sure of others. I’m just trying to figure out what careers would accept a BA in Engineering.
In these cases, the BS programs in engineering majors are ABET-accredited, while the BA/AB programs are not.
The ABET-accredited programs are better suited for those who want to work as engineers (particularly if PE licensing is needed or desired, most commonly in civil engineering) or want to take the patent exam. The non-ABET-accredited programs may be suitable for those who want some engineering knowledge but intend to go on to other careers (e.g. traditional prestige-college careers in Wall Street or management consulting).
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Sorry Brown and Rice. These BA majors in engineering aren’t worth much. If Wall Street is the goal, a student is better off with many other majors. Wall Street hires few, if any, engineering majors(other than financial engineering, which isn’t really engineering) at the bechelor level to begin with. Engineering majors with less quantitative conent? Hard to see any takers.
I have an engineering BS from Brown. A friend in the local Brown club has a BA in engineering, though her career in engineering post-grad was somewhat tangential and brief by design. You might be able to get hired for a “mainstream” engineering job with a BA, but personally when I looked through applications I don’t imagine I would have considered a BA if I had come across one. Even a BS in engineering might be more accurately thought of as “pre-engineering”, same as with undergrad for a lot of professions. So how “thin” do want a hire to be on math, science, and core engineering courses when they are already going to need a lot of job-specific training as it is?
In general, I think an engineering BA could be great for someone who is going into something else, but wants to be able to think/analyze/reason like an engineer. Or say combined with pre-law, if planning to eventually practice patent law (another person in our Brown club, though AFAIK he was BS engineering).
As for ABET, I went through that exercise while mentoring a UCSD undergrad who, due to course restrictions, was looking at being stuck graduating with a non-ABET-accredited (at UCSD anyway) major of Engineering Science, instead of his desired Mechanical Engineering. I hadn’t heard of ABET, but researched and found it was just a later incarnation of the ECPD (Engineer’s Council for Professional Development) that was around when I graduated. I checked with an engineering VP friend who does extensive hiring and – no surprise – he hadn’t heard of ABET and didn’t care about it. What he looks for in hiring is good grades in the engin/math courses from an accredited institution of higher learning, extracurriculars which suggest a passion for engineering (e.g. SAE team project competitions), along with good communication skills. That would pretty much be my list too.
Dartmouth offers two paths, non-ABET BA in 4 or ABET BS in 5 (hold onto your wallet!). Cal Poly offers a non-ABET BA in Liberal Arts Engineering, but only 1% of all enrolled engineers chose that route. My suggestion is to get an ABET accredited BS (with a few RARE exceptions) if you want to be a practicing engineer.
DOOH! And now I realized this was essentially a dead thread. OOPS! 