I’m a high school senior and I’m afraid I have a pretty stupid question. It’s in the title, but let me explain incase it’s not clear.
Most schools that I have seen, save for some open-curriculum schools like Brown, have their courses and majors organized into various schools/colleges like a College of Arts and Sciences, a College of Engineering, a School of Business, etc. My question is do schools usually allow their students to take classes that fall outside of the college they have enrolled in? For example, if I’m enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences for School A, can I just sign up for some Biomedical Engineering course in their College of Engineering?
If not, then, well, that sucks. If so, what are the usual policies when it then comes to majors and minors? If I’m not mistaken, you need to choose a major that is in your specific college, right? So if I’m enrolled in School A’s CAS, but I decide halfway through Sophomore year that I want to be a Biomedical Engineer, I have to internally transfer to School A’s College of Engineering, right? I can’t just take all of the major required courses for BME while I’m still in School A’s CAS?
Thanks in advance, and I know this question is really dumb.
I believe it would dependent upon your college’s policy. At my son’s college, students admitted into the Engineering majors have priority in signing up for the Engineering classes. If any spots are available after all Engineering majors have signed up, then non-majors are allowed to take these courses. Also they are very strict on making sure that if the course has specific pre-requisites, that they have been fulfilled prior to letting non-majors take the course.
Changing majors will also be specific to your schools policy. Many schools do not admit by major and will allow you declare a major up to the end of Sophomore year. If you have a specific school(s) in mind, you should post their names so CC posters can help answer your questions more thoroughly.
Generally, yes, but students who need a course for their majors may get first priority for registration. In your example, biomedical engineering majors may get first priority for biomedical engineering courses; if the number of biomedical engineering majors is enough to fill the available capacity in those courses, students in other majors may not be able to take them.
This could be the case even if you are in the same division, or if the school is not divided into divisions.
This might be obvious but I’ll mention it anyway – you would also have to take all of the prerequisites for the course, which can be prohibitive for engineering (could be math, physics, chem, and/or previous engineering courses).
For example if you wanted to take the first real ChemE course at my school, you would have to take Differential Equations (which itself would have required taking the calculus series). That type of preparation may not be common in whatever major the student was actually in.
Depends on the college. At Case Western, who has a single door admission policy, you can take classes in any of the school regardless of major.
At TCNJ, they save the spring semester instance of a class (e.g., Bio 2) for majors only.
At Rutgers, you can’t take Business School classes unless you are in the business schools.
If you aren’t sure what you want to major in, it might be better to take the more difficult to get into major’s classes first…start as a Biomedical Engineer and take English classes as electives.
If you are doing it as away to be an engineer without getting into the engineering school, then it probably won’t work because they will prevent that.
Well whether or not you can transfer into new major depends on college as well, since some have specific requirements. But usually your pre-reqs are from other schools anyway. For instance, an engineering major would likely have to take core classes in english, math, social science, language, etc and most of these would be in Arts and Sciences anyway.
Some classes may be restricted to declared majors or might hold off on allowing non-majors to register until all other students in the major have registered and then open it up to all who have the prerequisites
Agree with above to start by declaring most restrictive major (or more lock-stepped). Easier to switch out of engineering, business, nursing, etc than to transfer in.