Mechanical engineering student would like to improve his GPA. Any advice regarding which MEEN/NonMEEN technical electives students will most likely to get an A in? Which ones to avoid???
My son ended his first two semesters in the TAMUG Engineering overflow program with about a 3.2 GPA. He wants MEEN–only major he has ever really wanted. He will apply for ETAM later this fall. This was what we did to help his GPA. First of all, I used Excel to show him the effect of getting good vs. mediocre grades. We warned him that having as close as possible to a 3.5 is the only way anyone can effectively guarantee anything. So he took three courses this summer. After getting an A in Math 150 and taking Math 151 AP credit, he attempted Math 152 last spring, was getting 60’s on exams, and we had him Q-drop at the last minute and continue to audit the course for the last couple of weeks. This summer, he took ARCH 350 (History and Theory of Modern and Contemporary Architecture) online from a College Station professor during Summer I, then we sent him back to Galveston Summer II to take Math 152 under Philip Brown (good professor) and also online ENGL 210 (Business and Technical Writing) (professor was a TAMUG professor). We sat on him all summer as well, doing more than crossing our fingers that the considerable expense would be worth it. We certainly paid a lot for the three A’s he got in these courses, wow. ARCH 350 also has some sibling architectural history courses, all of them bearing creative arts core and cultural diversity credits, and the reviews on the professors all indicate the possibility of getting an A. Our son enjoyed the material. A lot of engineers like architecture. ENGL 210 counts for required communication credit. This was actually an interesting and useful class, because the students had to write a number of very practical pieces, e.g., good news/bad news letters, technical proposals, resume with cover sheet, some discussion pieces about the Hillbilly Elegy book that the students were using in a lot of courses last year, etc., along with weekly or twice weekly discussion board responses. With good effort to follow the rubrics and good proofreading, a person can get an A in that class as well. There is an Art History course, I believe it’s ARTS 150, that also bears creative arts and cultural diversity credit and is a straightforward course under certain professors, anyway. Recommend picking out courses that will satisfy some core credit or two preferably, of course, then researching the professors pretty heavily. Other courses that look promising for just GPA points but not degree credit per se are some of the kinesiology courses, and there was an Introduction to Logic course (deductive and inductive logic taught through the philosophy department) that was also in the back pocket in case the summer grades didn’t pan out as hoped. Word of warning: these TAMU summer courses, even the online courses, were not a bargain, oh no. I believe we even had to pay an extra online course penalty for one of them. It’s strange, but some online courses have an online penalty that has to be paid, and some don’t. You can see this in the course descriptions in the course schedule. This is all that I personally can offer on this topic, and others will hopefully also weigh in. There were very few students in residence during the summer in Galveston–fewer than 50 undergraduates. I would take this same approach again, however, just get out the wallet for summer courses, but these courses could be taken in other semesters as well.
Perhaps your son already has all his core and diversity credits, but it still seems like a better idea to take something non-technical to have the best chance at an A. But would your student be interested in pursuing a minor in an aspect of computing by taking non-major programming or so classes, or how about a minor in a foreign language–something like that? He would be satisfying an interest and also boosting his GPA.