If you pursue a Dartmouth engineering AB (which is the same as a “BA”), then you will be able to explore other fields (and potentially double-major) over four years. The catch: you won’t get a “real” engineering degree after four years. Engineering employers and grad schools will typically perceive the AB as “engineering lite”.
If you stay for a fifth year, and add some extra engineering coursework, you can “upgrade” an AB to a BE. This does not impede you at all from studying other fields during Years 1 to 4, because it happens separately during Year 5. The catch: it means that your undergraduate studies take five years instead of the normal four, which obviously means more time and money.
You can’t get a BS at Dartmouth in any field. The only bachelor’s degree that they offer is the AB, plus the BE for fifth-year engineers. The five-year “Bachelor of Engineering” (BE) at Dartmouth is equivalent to the four-year “Bachelor of Science” (BS) in engineering offered by most other schools.
In other words, the AB and BE aren’t two separate tracks. You don’t start your Dartmouth engineering career by committing to one or the other.
Every Dartmouth engineer starts on the AB track, which provides lots of room to explore other fields, and potentially to double-major.
After four years, every Dartmouth engineer gets an AB degree. There’s just one catch: this is not a “real” engineering degree.
You don’t make a final decision between the AB and BE until your senior year. At that point, you may decide that the (less marketable) AB degree is good enough, and leave Dartmouth after four years of study. Alternatively, you can decide to stay at Dartmouth for a fifth year, which will “upgrade” the AB to the (more marketable) BE.
“Now, if you started out as a math or physics major, then OK, you maybe did take a bunch of math and science courses, so in that case it would likely be feasible to explore EE or even switch majors.”
That was all I was getting at in #16. And also the reverse, you could switch to a physics major in the liberal arts college from engineering.
“But if you are a typical LAC student, and you didn’t commit to a math/science-intensive schedule as a freshman, then switching to engineering later and still finishing in four years is probably not going to work.”
True. But somebody who might want to switch to engineering is likely not a “typical” LAC student. He/she is likely a fledgling physical sciences major. And those majors have sets of recommended courses starting freshman year.
The set of recommended courses for a physics major, when/ where I attended, was very analogous to what the engineering students were required to take.
Now if you are a fledgling philosophy major and then decide to switch to engineering you likely will not have taken anything like the required sequences. But that’s not generally the case, IMO.
re: #19, " I would really like to explore other areas like languages and social sciences (Econ and foreign relations)":
BS engineering degrees include space for some amount of non-engineering elective courses. In fact a certain number of credits in such areas are actually required by accreditation bodies. Different programs vary somewhat in exactly how much room for electives you would have. They may be enough for you, to explore those other interests… (or not, it depends on how much you want obviously).
Which leads us full circle to my answer in post #1 which is that any number of LACs can serve as a platform for obtaining a BE, or BS in engineering, so long as the OP is willing to spend an extra year (or two for a BS from Columbia) at another college: http://www.wesleyan.edu/engineering/3-2_program.html
FWIW, I am not a fan of those programs that require switching colleges .My understanding is few people complete them, and I am not surprised. . There is nobody at your first college who knows anything about engineering. No faculty, no engineering students, no lectures or activities on campus- so you will learn nothing to give you any meaningful guidance for when you get to the subsequent college. My understanding is financial aid doesn’t track to the second school. Your social life is uprooted. Social integration at the second school is difficult, because you are like a temporary transfer student and are taking like a zillion tough engineering credits there. And there is no career I’m aware of that you need two bachelor’s degrees for.
In most cases, at the point you are at an LAC and decide you really want to be an engineer instead, you are better off just transferring at that point to an engineering school to get your engineering degree, without going back to your LAC subsequently. IMO. Or instead you might finish off your BA in physics and then apply to a Master of Engineering program someplace. (Which is what I actually did). Depending on what you want out of a liberal arts education, it may be the case that you can continue learning what you want to learn outside of school, and forever, without getting a bachelor of arts degree.
If for some reason you really want the “five year program”, the ones that don’t force you to uproot yourself socially seem more feasible to me. Like the Dartmouth one, as described. Or the 3-2 with Barnard-Columbia.
Of the mentioned schools, to me it seems like Dartmouth. Rice and Tufts would be better situations, from that perspective. With Rice having the best reputation in engineering. IMO.
If you are interested in a particular area you shouldn’t go to a school that doesn’t even offer so much as a single course in it.
re #14, most people (by far) who go to selective, good engineering schools with high freshman admissions standards do finish, and in four years. The reputation comes mostly from the state universities who take in a lot of people who can’t do the work, and then shed them. The good private u’s don’t work that way. IIRC the completion rate from my engineering college was very high. And many of the people who did leave transferred to other areas within the university, no huge disruption was involved.
re #23: " any number of LACs can serve as a platform for obtaining a BE, or BS in engineering, so long as the OP is willing to spend an extra year (or two for a BS from Columbia) at another college:"
@monydad is engineering more a choice during freshman year, like a yes or a no, or something in which a couple classes can be taken? I feel like I have too many other interests and would not be willing to commit to 4-5 years pretty much pure engineering. At schools like Tufts or rice, is it possible to take some courses related to engineeeing without being a major?
I might be interested in computer science, even though I don’t have much exposure to it. My dad is a software engineer though. I feel like it would be a good balance between math/science without being full in engineering
At my school engineering is a separate college you apply to and enroll in from day one.
So it is, in effect, a choice made senior year of high school.
But a non-engineering student can take classes in any college there, including engineering, so long as they meet prerequisites.
If , after enrolling, you find it is not your cup of tea, you would have to transfer colleges. Either internally- within the university, or externally. As I mentioned above, such a transfer after freshman year need not delay your graduation date.
My school also allowed for a number of outside electives that many students found sufficient. At the time, anyway.
FWIW, at my school the CS major is shared between the engineering college and the arts & sciences college.
But my school is not on your list.
I am not intimately familiar with how other universities/colleges do things, but people have represented that it varies.
So you would need to check each program you are thinking about applying to, for their particular deal.
Somewhat unrelated, but I am very interested in studying Portuguese (or possibly Romanian since my Dad speaks R) in college. This would obviously be a vote towards Middlebury and Dartmouth since Bowdoin does not offer Portuguese, I believe. Is there a way I can display this unique interest to an admission committee? I looked into summer programs, but other than programs in Brasil/Portugal (pricey + my Portuguese isn’t very advanced) I found a program at Middlebury for high schoolers. The problem is that the program is crazy expensive, and way more than I can spend on a program like that ($9,500+ for seven weeks). Otherwise I can’t think of anything, or just anything plausible in general.