<p>Since engineering is very time consuming, does this effect the social life on campus? Are engineers typically separated from the rest of campus? Do they typically have engineering friends?</p>
<p>In general, how does majoring in engineering effect your social life compared to the life of a liberal arts or science major.</p>
<p>Well, everyone is different…but as one who graduated with a engineering degree, I can say my social life was significantly less than that of business majors, communications majors, and other liberal arts majors.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that I didn’t time for fun - I did on Friday evening and all day Saturday. But my freshman and sophmore year I didn’t do very much besides studying and going to class. It got easier as time went on.</p>
<p>I’m now a full time real engineer and am enrolled in a part time masters degree program that I do in the evening. Now I really don’t have a social life (but will have a masters degree paid by the company within a year).</p>
<p>As bigtrees said, you won’t have as much free time as say a business/comm major, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have free time. As long as you stay on top of your classes, you can take it easy on some weekends. When you have multiple exams in a single week or a huge project due, for example, you obviously won’t have free time.</p>
<p>Here’s a suggestion:</p>
<p>Don’t take Thermodynamics, Advanced Statistics, Fluid Mechanics, and Introduction to Circuits all in the same quarter. You might not have much free time if you do that!</p>
<p>If a social life is important to you, you will find a way to have one. I was not a social person, so most of my time was spent studying since I didn’t have plans to do much else and I was not a very sharp student. I had to work much harder than others to achieve the same results. It was really bad for the first 2 years but after transferring schools the burden got less.</p>
<p>During my freshman and sophomore years I remember staying up until 2am doing homework. After that I never stayed up past midnight. But now as a full-time engineer I feel I have less life outside of work than I did at college because I am away from home for 15 hours everyday work on a big project. 12 weeks down so far, 6 more to go.</p>
<p>I was not engineering as an undergrad per se (math & computer science) but you will have less time for social activities than others because of studying and time in the lab. Having said that, I would use some summer terms to take a couple of classes (mainly general education stuff) in order to lighten the load on technical courses during the Fall/Spring semesters.</p>
<p>I second the suggestion to use summer for easy liberal classes. Unless you are truly interested in a business, history, or communications course, it’s a lot better to take them over the summer where they pretty much hand you the passing grade for the credits. It’s much better than having to actually do work for a class you don’t care about during the semester when you have 3 or 4 real engineering classes to focus on.</p>
<p>Plenty of engineering students in my school opt to take a smaller course load and graduate in 5 years as opposed to 4. Thats one way of having a stronger social life as an engineering major, but at the cost of an extra year.</p>