<p>I have 2 questions relating to engineering at LACs.</p>
<p>First, I know of one small LAC that offers an engineering major - Lafayette. Are there others?</p>
<p>Second, a lot of LACs have 3/2 programs in engineering. But I'm wondering how a student on a small campus without an engineering major decides to pursue this route without the ability to take one or two courses in engineering first, just to try it out. Do they do so just based on, say, enjoying physics at their LAC? Do schools with 3/2 programs do anything special to expose students to engineering as a career?</p>
<p>Smith has a four-year engineering major, with guaranteed admission (with a 3.5 GPA) to the graduate engineering programs at Notre Dame, Princeton, Dartmouth, Tufts, Johns Hopkins, and University of Michigan. No other college in the country offers the same. They are just completing a $75 million engineering/molecular sciences center.</p>
<p>My sons looked at the LACs and small engineering programs but found the number of offerings or majors in the engineering fields very limiting in the small schools.</p>
<p>If you are lucky you can do Civil, Mechanical, and Chemical. Perhaps there are one or two other choices to pursue.</p>
<p>At the larger schools you can have 15 - 20 different fields inside engineering to pursue.</p>
<p>Swarthmore has an engineering major that's not accredited, but seems fairly good as a platform for graduate programs.</p>
<p>As for how you decide to do a 3-2 program: Many/most colleges seem to require engineering majors to commit upon application. It is often possible, even easy, to drop out of engineering into another field, but often difficult, even impossible, to drop into an engineering major that you didn't start on Day 1. That doesn't seem to stop hordes of high school seniors from applying to engineering programs. At the LACs with 3-2 programs, I'll bet far more students begin them than complete them.</p>
<p>Off the top of my head (after having two kids go through the college search process in the past few years), some small liberal arts colleges that have engineering majors include Swarthmore, Washington & Lee, Grove City, and Messiah. At some of these schools, engineering majors may be limited (or even part of a physics department, with a major in engineering physics), but there is something to be said for graduating in four years.</p>
<p>By the way, a 3/2 program is not your only option for having an engineering career while attending a liberal arts college as an undergrad. I know a number of friends who attended LACs with a physics major as an undergrad and then went directly into a PhD program in mechanical engineering at MIT (I see you are from Minnesota. One friend attended Bethel in Minnesota), and another friend who majored in biology and chemistry at Amherst and went into a PhD program in Chem Engineering at MIT.</p>
<p>To answer your question about how a student could decide on engineering before taking any engineering courses, it may be possible for a physics major to get a summer job at an engineering company. This is not the usual track, but it cannot hurt to try. Furthermore, schools with 3/2 programs may offer some basic engineering courses (such as beginning engineering mechanics) that let students experience some of the flavor of the discipline. Finally, this choice is no more difficult than a high school senior deciding that he wants to attend a college and major in engineering.</p>
<p>Bryn Mawr has a 3-2 engineering program with CalTech. While at Bryn Mawr, you would be able to take a few engineering classes at Swarthmore through the tri-college consortium before committing.</p>
<p>Union College in Schenectady, NY has an excellent engineering program (not a 3/2). Small universities like University of Rochester may also satisfy your requirements.</p>
<p>If you want to be an engineering major I would not recommend going the 3-2 route. First there is the matter of cost because of the extra year. For some families this may be no big deal but for others it may be.</p>
<p>But most importantly it is very difficult for many students to leave their LAC class and friends an enroll as a new student in a university where they have no connections. One of my son's friends did this and ended up ditching the 3-2 plan and graduated as a physics major at the LAC he attended.</p>
<p>I think that the far better choice is to enroll at a college or university which offers an engineering major be it a small college like Lafayette or Union or a midsized university like Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>mini: right, I: wrong about Swarthmore's accreditation. If you are interested in engineering at a LAC, I suggest you read Swarthmore Engineering's thoughtful defense of the notion (and answer to the "What? No EE major?" question) on its website.</p>
<p>Olin is a small engineering school, not a liberal arts college.</p>
<p>
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Smith has a four-year engineering major, with guaranteed admission (with a 3.5 GPA) to the graduate engineering programs at Notre Dame, Princeton, Dartmouth, Tufts, Johns Hopkins, and University of Michigan. No other college in the country offers the same. They are just completing a $75 million engineering/molecular sciences center.
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<p>Mini, not that it matters much, but are you absolutely certain that all the schools you listed do indeed have a GUARANTEED admission for Smithies with a 3.5 GPA? It seems that the language describing the program has disappeared from the public pages. How about Princeton?</p>
<p>And, fwiw, while "no other college offers the same" might be true, I'd like to think that the same schools would be quite interested in any female scholar who was able to maintain a 3.5 GPA in an engineering program at a competitive school. I also think that the doors would swing wide open for any female engineering graduate from, say, Harvey Mudd --even with a lower GPA.</p>
<p>I second originaloog about his advice to be careful about 3-2 programs.</p>
<p>A girl who graduated this year from Bryn Mawr came here to do the 3-2 engineering program with Caltech. Halfway through her sophomore year Caltech decided that it will no longer fund international students in the program, so she could not afford to go and graduated summa cum laude with a double-major in math and physics from Bryn Mawr instead.</p>
<p>Lesson learned: don't rely on a program three years ahead in the future. Policies might change, the program might be discontinued or you might not be accepted into it. If you want to go into engineering, it is safer to attend a college with an actual engineering program.</p>
<p>
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Through admissions agreements with Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Tufts University, and the University of Michigan, students who maintain an overall GPA of 3.5 and a GPA of 3.5 within the major are automatically admitted to graduate study in an engineering discipline at these schools.
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<p>Of course there is no guarantee that the automatic admission programs will be continued for 5 more years.</p>