<p>After being admitted as an ME transfer to Cal I was bummed to find out I couldn't change my major because I was having second thoughts about it. After a lot of consideration I'm thinking adding a minor in EECS should be a good compromise.</p>
<p>I've been programming in all sorts of languages and frameworks for over 10 years, so the CS classes don't really worry me. But I'm a little worried about switching from community college to the rigor of Cal, so the GPA limit for the minor looms large. What do you guys think? Should this be doable?</p>
<p>You can change your major lol. Where did you hear about that? You just need to finish 1 year of mechE (which all engineers are basically the same coursework the first year so you wouldn’t be far behind).
<a href=“http://coe.berkeley.edu/students/current-undergraduates/majors-minors/change-of-major.html”>http://coe.berkeley.edu/students/current-undergraduates/majors-minors/change-of-major.html</a></p>
<p>That link says that transfer students cannot change majors. OP is a transfer student.</p>
<p>Sorry, I didn’t see that. Can you add a regular L&S CS major? minor? on top of that</p>
<p>@5oviet, as a junior level transfer into the engineering school I definitely can’t add a major. I still need to talk to someone at Cal about whether I can add a minor, but I haven’t seen anything that says I can’t.</p>
<p>I would say go ahead and add the minor. If you start to struggle, then drop it. But if you don’t add it now and you have second thoughts later, it’ll be too late to add the minor and have enough credits to graduate on time.</p>
<p>@ThePainter7, I guess my question is more about how difficult this plan would be. If it’s insanely difficult and I’l likely have to drop the minor, then this may not be the option for me. I’d hate to graduate and not even have the option to work in software, so much so that I’m considering not doing ME and instead reapplying next year to a different major.</p>
<p>It would be difficult, but since you have experience in CS, it would help a lot. Write down a tentative class schedule of your next few years in Berkeley where you include an EECS minor and see whether it’ll be too much for you. Ideally, a not-too-stressful schedule would have around 4 classes a semester, and hopefully, not all the classes would be ME and EECS. I would also suggest talking to a counselor in the College of Engineering about the rigor of the specific courses. </p>
<p>Good idea @sheepsgobaa. I should look into that. I’m not really sure what my schedule will look like since I’m coming in as a transfer, so I don’t know which classes I still have to take.</p>
<p>Can anyone say what my career prospects would be like if I went this route? The thing that’s concerning me is that when I search on monster.com near LA the number of results I get look like this:
Software Engineer: ~800
Mechanical Engineer: ~60
Control Systems: <10</p>
<p>I don’t go to Cal yet, but I have heard that many students go on to become developers and programmers despite the fact that they do not major in EECS/CS (for example, even some CogSci students work in the software industry upon graduation, so I don’t think it would be difficult for a MechE student to get into that as well if that’s what you want to do.) </p>
<p>@Angelj So you selected Cal over UCLA? Congrats! Have you looked at the CFD lab at Cal? </p>
<p><a href=“http://cfd.me.berkeley.edu/”>http://cfd.me.berkeley.edu/</a></p>
<p>@Truust, thanks, that’s encouraging to hear! I was under the same impression that you didn’t really need a CS degree to work in software. That, plus all my experience in programming, is why I chose to major in MechE. I know that an actual CS graduate would be more qualified for those better, higher paying, software jobs though, so I started having doubts.</p>
<p>@cadave, thanks! But I’m still weighing my options. And thanks for that link! I didn’t know about some of those uses for CFD!</p>
<p>A few years ago in Formula 1 racing, a new, lower budget team came on to the scene with the intention of developing their car using only CFD instead of expensive wind tunnel testing. When they were pretty much laughed at for this I kind of took it to heart, lol. To my dismay, that plan wasn’t really a success, so I’m excited to see the technology continue to grow and prove its worthiness!</p>