<p>This is not a better plan. You are still assuming that you can finish an engineering degree in 2.5 years. Unless you are a transfer student, I am betting that you do not have enough advanced credit to finish an engineering degree in 2.5 years!</p>
<p>Have you looked at the course handbooks with required course sequences for any school that you are interested in? The departmental webpages usually post a sample course plan for students; that will give you a rough idea of how many courses you will be expected to take. Even students in dedicated engineering schools (Georgia Tech, Harvey Mudd, SEAS at Columbia) take four years to finish, and many of them take 4.5-5 years; students in other kinds of programs usually take five, and sometimes even 6. It’s a rigorous course of study and many times requires 150 credits instead of the usual 120.</p>
<p>You also have to be admitted to a BS/MS program in order to ‘stay’ to get an MS. It doesn’t happen automatically. First you have to go to a school that has such a program. Not all schools do, not even all schools with MS degrees. Then you have to be admitted into that program. Even if that happens, though, those usually take 5-6 years to complete. Thinking you can complete it in 3.5 years coming in as a freshman is a little bit silly.</p>
<p>To answer your question, international students can more easily secure funding for graduate degrees than undergrad. In those programs, the financial aid requirements usually aren’t constrained based on citizenship. There are also quite a few funded MS programs in engineering. However, they’re usually done independently and not in a BS/MS program.</p>
<p>To echo juillet, this is not a better plan, it is the same plan with an option for following a highly improbable bachelors with a highly improbable masters.</p>
<p>While the best financial aid is reserved for US students, there are at least private loans that may be worthwhile to extend your stay for a couple of more semesters. They will be more expensive, but your current plan sounds like the educational equivalent of piling your cash in a pile and setting it on fire.</p>
<p>If you are an international student, is there a reason why you are eschewing domestic options? At the least you might be able to do a year or two at school in your home country and then transfer to a US school to finish. Better yet, if you WANT to do an MS, get your undergrad at home and then apply to a US graduate school - my former lab group was 100% Chinese (except for me), none of whom did their undergrads in the US.</p>
<p>Financial aid for grad students is limited to assistantships and fellowships, both of which are available to masters candidates but in practice are directed more often to PhD candidates. Plus, while such aid often includes a tuition waiver, at a state school they might only waive a domestic rate that is less than internationals pay. Not sure.</p>
<p>I’m not able to get in my desired programs in my country. If you want to get in, you’ll need straight A’s (or A-). With 1 or 2 B’s, sorry. Goodbye. While I may get into some private colleges, the thing is, you just go in and study, pass the exam, get the BS and go to work. The teaching is not that good and research experience is almost non-existent.</p>
He was an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon. He was accelerated in math at an early age, which allowed him to take college-level math classes in high school and graduate-level courses in college. This form of acceleration is not actually all that uncommon in the US.</p>
<p>OK, another revised plan:
Spring 2012
Fall 2012, Spring 2013
Fall 2013 (apply for grad school), Spring 2014 (if accepted, go to grad school; if not, stay for 1 more year, take some advanced courses)
Fall 2014 (apply again for grad school), Spring 2015</p>
<p>^ Are you sure it makes sense to start an engineering major in the spring semester? You’ll be looking at long chains of prerequisites; those usually start in the fall, but at a few universities it may indeed make sense to start in the spring. Be careful about your start time if you want to minimize the time until graduation.</p>
<p>I think there are two separate questions here. One is whether it’s possible to finish an engineering major in 2.5-3 years. The second is whether it will put you at a disadvantage graduate school-wise.</p>
<p>There is no doubt in my mind that rushing through college will hurt your graduate application. But let’s look at the logistics of graduating in 3 years with an open mind.</p>
<p>You say that you are an international student. Would you mind sharing with us where you are from and what high school curriculum you have been following? If you are from one of those school systems that prepare you to place out of all first-year sciences (calculus, physics, general chemistry) <em>and</em> you get a year’s worth of credit for your high school work which also counts towards some of the general education requirements, you might have a shot at finishing in 3 years.</p>
<p>Is there another country that you could look into that may not take as long as the US like Germany? Those universities are fairly cheap. </p>
<p>I totally agree with juillet and cosmicfish. You are being overly ambitious with this. What happens if one of your classes gets cancelled? We do have serious funding issues in the US that it’s possible for classes to be cancelled or capped before you know it due to fewer number of classes being taught and available instructors to cover them. </p>
<p>I would seriously sit down with a course handbook and map it all out for you see that it’s basically impossible to graduate in less than 4 years with an engineering degree.</p>
<p>After careful consideration, I have decided not to rush the college. Instead, I have 2 new options:
(A)
Spring 2012
Fall 2012, Spring 2013
Fall 2013, Spring 2014
Fall 2014 (apply to grad school), Spring 2015 (finish undergrad)
Total = 3.5 years, 3 summers, but I don’t think I can get any internships in Summer 2012, do I?</p>
<p>(B)
Fall 2012, Spring 2013
Fall 2013, Spring 2014
Fall 2014 , Spring 2015
Fall 2015 (apply to grad school), Spring 2016 (finish undergrad)
Total = 4 years, 3 summers, but I’ll have to wait one more year until Fall 2012, which means that 1 more year slower than option A</p>
<p>I apologize for my silly and idiotic questions before. Now the question is, if I choose a school with flexible schedule (haven’t decided yet, still looking around), that the prerequisite courses will be offered in both Fall and Spring, should I wait until Fall 2012 to start my college? Or starting in Spring 2012 would be better?</p>
<p>If I start in Spring 2012, I don’t think I can get any internships in Summer 2012 with just one semester of stay, that means I might waste 1 summer, only 2 summers left</p>
<p>If I start in Fall 2012, I can have 3 summers but I’ll waste 1 year…</p>
<p>I have searched through the European universities and I can’t find any with English as teaching medium at undergrad. They use English at graduate level (Master and PhD). I wouldn’t mind learning a foreign language but you know, learning Maths, Science and Engineering in foreign language is completely different. It takes very long time to learn a foreign language.</p>
<p>It’s almost impossible that you will finish an undergrad degree in less than 3 years. That’s the fastest I’ve ever seen anyone do it in the US, and they came in with a full year’s worth of credit. Due to course pre-requisites you won’t be able to finish faster than that.</p>
<p>As an international student, the funding situation is completely different. You may not be eligible for most funding that students would receive (even in graduate school). Also, you most likely will not be eligible to work during the summers as an intern.</p>
Those are probably the easiest subjects to learn in a foreign language! The key information in the sciences in conveyed in formulas and easy-to-learn technical language, rather than prose with subtle shades of meaning. Back when I was studying math at a German university, there were several Asian students in my classes who did not appear to speak much German. They might have been a bit isolated socially, but academically they seemed to be doing fine.</p>
<p>I bet you could do just fine at a German university if you spend one year learning German beforehand; maybe with an intensive full-immersion summer course in Germany preceding your first semester. FYI, tuition at (public) German universities runs between $50 and $800 per semester for all students regardless of nationality or residence status. (And you wouldn’t want to attend the private universities anyway…) Living expenses are a bit cheaper too in Germany than they are in the US (relative to average income) - as long as you stay out of Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin at least. Of course your “perceived expenses” will fluctuate with currency exchange rates.</p>
Visa-wise, international students are allowed to pursue internships (both paid and unpaid) related to their major(s) after their first full academic year in the US. Whether engineering companies discriminate against international students in the hiring process, I do not know.</p>
<p>Barium, I do consider a German university, but German Language is not easy! I’m not sure whether I can understand what the German lecturer says. What about the interaction with the German professors? I guess not all German professors speak English. How do I get LOR from them?</p>
<p>I have browsed through some forums and many people say German Language is really extremely difficult, even for foreigners who have stayed there for years.</p>
<p>The only tricky aspect of German are suffixes. All nouns, pronouns and verbs have suffixes that need to be matched to gender, verb tense, grammatical case and sentence position. Mismatched suffixes are the easiest way to spot a non-native speaker and something that even immigrants who have been in the country for decades still screw up occasionally. </p>
<p>But you don’t need to learn German to perfection to be understood. Germans will understand you perfectly fine even if you get an occasional suffix wrong, and you will be able to read and understand spoken German with a bit of practice. Getting that practice ahead of time will make the transition to a lecture hall a bit easier; that’s why I would suggest spending the summer summer before the beginning of your first semester in Germany. </p>
<p>I grew up in Germany and attended a German university for a year; then I transferred to an American college and finished my undergraduate education there. Now I am a PhD student in the US.</p>