I have a question,
If I chose to study, let’s say, International Business, could I then transfer, if I have good grades, to an engineering major?
The reason I ask is because I want to know if I should put an easier major to get into an ivy league school, and once I’m in, I could switch out of the major if I don’t like it.
What do you guys think?
The Ivy League schools don’t care what major you put down on the application. They look at the total pool of students, not segregating by major.
Check their policies before you make any rash decisions. It’s often difficult to do an internal transfer to engineering. Schools know there are people (like you!) trying to game the system.
It is easy to transfer from one liberal arts major to another but an internal transfer from a liberal arts school to an engineering school would likely be difficult. What ErinsDad said in comment #1 about changing majors would be true if you were not trying to transfer to a different school within the university.
Schools are wise to the “game” of people applying to one program/school and then trying to move to a program/school with more difficult admissions and discourage the practice by making internal transfers to the more selective programs exceedingly difficult Secondly engineering would be a hard major to transfer into as the coursework starts freshman year and many of the courses are sequential in nature so catching-up would be a huge challenge.
Bottom line is if you want to study engineering, I’d apply to engineering programs. Just be sure to have a good mix of reach/target/safety schools. It should be no issue to switch from engineering into a liberal arts major if you decide it is not what you want.
It depends on the school. Some admit regardless of major and you don’t have to have an admit to the schools of engineering. At Brown, for instance, you can put Undecided, or physics or art history and still sign up for the engineering courses as you don’t declare major until end of sophomore year. I suppose you weren’t thinking of Brown but a couple other Ivy are like that, look at each school individually, they are not homogenous.
@BrownParent can you tell me which Ivy League schools admit by major? I though none did. Thx
@ErinsDad I don’t know of any Ivy that admits by major but some do admit by school/program Ex. Wharton. and the Engineering School at UPenn as well as programs such as M&T have separate admission standards as compared to Penn College of Arts and Sciences. Some other Ivys admit by undergrad schools as well.
As far as I know people are not admitted by a major nor or they tied to any major within their school – that would seem impossible to do since majors are not formally declared until think the end of soph. year.
Transfer from Penn CAS to Penn SEAS is easy. You have to meet minimum GPA though. My daughter did.
Another option at Penn is dual degree. Penn CAS students can have second major at any other Penn school, including Wharton. It’s more difficult but some people go with this option.
https://www.college.upenn.edu/academic-opportunities/degree-programs/dual-degree
@erinsad I didn’t say any admit by major. Sorry if I was unclear, but I meant what @happy1 said, if you are engineering major you have to be admitted to the engineering school at some, but not all.