I was curious how engineering works at Ohio State wrt freshman.
Do they need to have a major chosen their freshman year?
Is it easy to change engineering majors? If so, how soon?
Some of the other schools we are considering have a generic engineering class freshman year that exposes the student to various eng majors before having to choose. Does Ohio State have this or something similar?
Freshman can be direct admits to the college of engineering. But they are not directly admitted to a speciality (EE, chemE, etc.). You do that at the end of your first year (towards end of spring semester with decisions over the summer). All kids admitted to engineering college take a first year engineering class:
Let me add a bit more information.
You are initially a pre-major in a certain discipline, say, Biomedical. It is easy to change to being pre-major in another area. You need to finish certain classes for apply to get into each major, and the list can be different across majors. There is a lot of overlap, for example, the freshmen engineering sequence is required for everyone, and then all majors require calculus (though to different levels). But, CSE doesn’t require any chemistry while many majors do. Similarly, CSE requires only 1 Physics class whereas most other areas require 2. So, you cannot go through a `common’ first year and have all options open. But if you are interested in a couple of different majors, you can look at the classes to be finished and try and do the union of those classes.
Hope this helps.