<p>I plan to major in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois. I'm counting on entering college with 50 credit hours due to AP classes. I will need 78 more credit hours to graduate, and I will only need to take one class that is not engineering, math, or science related in order to meet the graduation requirements. To graduate in 3 years I will only need to average 13 hours a semester, and surely, saving an entire year on college costs sound like a great idea if I can handle the courses. I have a few questions however:</p>
<p>-Are there any major disadvantages to graduating a year early? How do 3 year graduates generally do post-grad? Can you develop the necessary skills and network well enough in 3 years?</p>
<p>-Is it possible to get my master's degree in 4 years? A masters degree for ECE requires 32 credit hours. I could take a few classes for my masters my 6th semester, and do the remaining <32 in a year. The number sounds doable, but what I'm wondering is whether or not it would be wise or even possible to take such challenging classes typical of 5th year students in my 6th semester?</p>
<p>Must be nice to go to a good high school that offers that kind of opportunity. I had something like 20 hours and that was the max you could possibly get through my high school, haha.</p>
<p>Anyway, on to business…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think most people I know that graduated that fast went straight into graduate school, so I can’t really tell you how they did in industry. I can tell you they seemed to do just fine in school, though I only know if two or three people who actually did it.</p>
<p>Really the answer to this comes down to you. It would certainly give you less time to network and to grow as a person if you cut your studies by a year, even if you do save money. The important thing is that you ought to have most or all of the skills you need to succeed when you finish your degree. On the technical side of things, this likely isn’t a problem since you did earn the degree, after all. The bigger concern would be on the social/personal side of things. College is about studying to work for a career, but it is also about growing as a person. As long as you can adequately foster this part of your college experience in your three years as well, then I see no reason why you couldn’t succeed the same as any other graduate.</p>
<p>The other option would be to do a co-op and still take 4 years, but essentially two of those semesters and summers would be spent with a company earning money. That usually leads to a full-time job offer from that company as well as experience that is almost required to get a job elsewhere. If you are only there 3 years, you just have to make sure you are very good about getting an internship early. You will absolutely need internship experience to put on your resume to have a good shot at those great jobs, and you are essentially cutting out a whole summer in which to do them by taking only 3 years to get your degree. Just know this going in. If you stay on for graduate school, this becomes less important, especially if you eventually get a PhD, but there is no way you know if that will happen at this point.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I believe ECE at Illinois offers and 5 year BS/MS program, as do most departments there. If you are able to finish your BS in 3 under ordinary circumstances, you certainly may be able to knock out the BS/MS in 4 semesters. Keep in mind that this may not be a thesis-based MS though, in this case. You would have to check with your department on that. Usually a traditional, research/thesis-based MS takes a bit longer (a semester or two).</p>
<p>The real thing to consider is that graduate courses don’t have the same kind of time commitment than undergraduate classes do. They usually have much more. While the average hours taken by undergrads at most universities is something like 14 to 16 per semester, grad students are often taking ~9 hours per semester. Of course, if you are doing coursework-only, this probably goes up, so again you would have to just check with your department. I can just tell you that in my own graduate school experience, I spend as much time on 2 classes per semester doing school work as I did in undergrad on 4 or 5 classes.</p>
<p>Also keep in mind that at Illinois, a lot of those BS/MS programs require you to be a junior in standing with an exceptional GPA to get into the program. I was in ME there and the requirement was a 3.8 GPA. I certainly didn’t have that. Again, just look at your department to get informed. Normally you could wait a while before doing this but since you are thinking about fast-tracking it, you have to also bump these sorts of things up a year.</p>