I was just wondering how easy it is to change majors at schools such as Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, and the UC’s. I’m almost certain I want to major in engineering, but I’m still unsure where I want to specialize. I know that schools have their own policies with impacted majors and whatnot so I want to make sure I would be able to have options if I were to be accepted into any of these schools. Does anyone know how changing majors works at these schools within the college of engineering? And what about across different colleges within the school?
At Carnegie Mellon and the top UCs, you would need to apply to the college of engineering. For the UCs (and I think for CMU) you also need to specify which type of engineering in your initial application. Transferring out of the more popular/impacted majors to less impacted majors is usually easier. Eg transferring out of EECS at UC Berkeley is easier than transferring in. At UCB, EECS and Undecided are among the most difficult engineering majors to get into.
Likewise, getting accepted into the College of Engineering at UCB is much more difficult than getting to the L & S. Transferring from Engineering to L & S is also easier than vice versa.
You’d still need to keep up a high GPA to change majors at UCB.
At CMU, the SCS, the School of Computer Science, is more competitive to get into than CIT (forgot what it stands for, but it’s basically their engineering college).
At Cornell, you don’t declare your major in the College of Engineering until the end of sophomore year, I believe. By then you’ll have had exposure to the various disciplines and hopefully can make an informed decision.
After you declare your major, you’ll be taking more and more courses specific to your major and so (I’m speculating here) it would get harder to switch. However, according to DS who’s a freshman there now, some majors have more particular requirements than others. He has said that his current choice (mechanical) has little leeway in course choice, but he’s thinking of doing computer science, and that has more leeway. So I would think that it might be tricky to switch into mechanical engineering late in the game.
Finally, FWIW, I was at Cornell 30+ years ago and had a friend who started out as an electrical engineer. Midway through junior year she shocked her parents and switched to a geology major because she was so unhappy. Finished her geology major on time with the rest of us, got a fellowship to do an M.Eng. in materials science, and has done well at a major computer chip corporation ever since. So you never know!
@divinggirl6 No, CIT was not referring to Caltech. It’s referring to CMU’s College of Engineering.
[At CMU, the SCS, the School of Computer Science, is more competitive to get into than CIT (forgot what it stands for, but it’s basically their engineering college).]
@joreos And after looking at CMU’s website, it looks like you just sign up for the Engineering major in general when you first apply senior year, but don’t have to specify which type of engineering until after your freshman year or so.