How hard to major at Pomona while a Scripps student?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Scripps College
1

My daughter has been accepted to Scripps (woo-hoo!) and is planning on medical school, eventually. She is interested in the neuroscience major at Scripps, or cognitive science at Pomona. We see you can cross-major at Pomona, but how difficult is it to do? Are there road blocks?

2

In theory it should be easy. However, I can not tell you how easy it is in reality since neither of my kids have majored on another campus. They have, however, taken classes on other campuses and that has been pretty easy. Registration is all one system so there are no special steps to take to register in a class held on another campus.

There are some limitations such as classes that limit how many off campus student’s they take, but in general my kids have not had issues. I do know that the CS classes at Mudd are very popular and that can be a challenge to get in but they do try to accommodate as much as possible.

3

Majoring off-campus if the same exact major does not exist at your college is 100% not an issue. You get to take all of your classes for that major at the other college, get an additional academic adviser at the other college, and 99.99% of the time professors and other students will treat you the exact same way as if you were a student at Pomona in this scenario.

4

@AnneKatherine , thanks for all the info!

As I understand it, Scripps students usually don’t declare their majors until the end of sophomore year; yet for some consortium majors that my D is interested in (Computer Science and Cognitive Science), it appears that declaring the major is important to gaining priority to register for courses in the major.

Do you know if it’s difficult to declare a major earlier? I can’t imagine completing, for example, a computer science major, if one couldn’t begin the CS course sequence until junior year.

5

@aquapt You don’t need to have declared a major for intro classes but it can give you priority in registering for upper division courses. Yes, you can declare a major early if you’d like. Second semester of sophomore year is the deadline, not necessarily the norm.