I can’t really decide between natural sciences and engineering but there’s a good chance that I might realize I want to go into engineering more than natural sciences during undergrad.
If I choose to go into engineering, is Williams’ pre-engineering good enough? I’m just not quite sure how recognized that is because it’s not an official degree in engineering. Can you go to a grad school for engineering directly after doing pre-engineering at Williams? Also how does this program work? Do you apply for it at the time of admission or do you decide after you start attending?
Thank you
Here is the information from Williams about engineering:
https://physics.williams.edu/pre-engineering/
As you can see, most students just major in a science and go on to graduate school in engineering. A few participate in the split degree programs with Columbia or Dartmouth.
As the college itself notes on this webpage, someone who wants to get a job in engineering quickly, with fewer years of schooling, would be better off going to a college with an engineering major.
There are some excellent small liberal arts colleges with engineering majors, such as Swarthmore, Lafayette, Union, Trinity, and Bucknell.
My daughter was in your situation thei year wanting to do engineering. She turned down MIT and decided to attend Williams and get a Physics degree then get her Masters in Engineering. Who knows she starts school there in a couple of months and it may all change again. She wanted the smaller classes and direct contact with professors, not being taught by TA’s and professors that cared more about the grad students.
Then it doesn’t sound like Williams (or most other traditional liberal arts colleges) is a good choice for you. If you really think that you might want the option of engineering, then your best bet is to … go to a school that offers the option of engineering.
Yes, you could ultimately get an MS in engineering with a Williams science or math degree (probably in Physics). However, you will have to compete for grad school admissions against applicants with BS engineering degrees, and you will likely be at a disadvantage. Programs that do admit you will probably make you take undergraduate engineering courses that you missed as a physics major, so your MS may take longer than usual.
Alternatively, you could go to Williams and do the 3-2 or 2-1-1-1 programs with Columbia or Dartmouth. That yields a legit engineering BS degree – but it takes 5 years to get a degree that normally takes only 4.
This is a valid concern at many large universities, but there are small undergraduate-focused schools with engineering programs. Some LACs with engineering were listed above (Smith is another), and there are also more technically-focused schools like Harvey Mudd, RPI, WPI, or Lehigh.
If you are certain you want to be an engineer you are better served starting out as a freshman/woman in engineering. The 3-2 programs are certainly worthwhile, but the extra year in school just to get a liberal arts degree in addition to a bachelor’s degree in engineering is a large overhead. You can still take extra liberal arts courses as part of your undergraduate engineering major above the basic requirement without attending two schools.
Additionally, a master’s degree in engineering is not the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in engineering. Master’s degrees in engineering are typically specialized in a particular area of engineering, whereas an undergraduate engineering degree includes the interdisciplinary and disciplinary foundation engineering courses, basic and advanced science courses, the various interdisciplinary engineering laboratory courses, and in particular eight semesters of hands-on design work (which is required by the current ABET accreditation standards). You aren’t really an engineer with a master’s degree in engineering and a non-engineering bachelor’s degree. Some engineering graduate schools will not accept non-engineering undergraduates into their programs, and if they do they frequently require significant non-credit coursework to make up for what the student did not have as an undergraduate. Additionally, if you apply for a state or federal government engineering position, an ABET-accredited undergraduate (BS, BSE, or BE) degree is required in most cases. If you are interested in working in an engineering field in which the state Professional Engineer (PE) license is required (civil, environmental, structural, etc., being the most common), most state engineering registration boards require the undergraduate degree. Some engineering employers too require an undergraduate degree for many positions. With a graduate degree but no undergraduate engineering, you will lack the basic foundation design training, which is the foundational basis of all engineering.
This is generally true. But what if you aren’t certain that you want to be an engineer – which seems to be the situation for the OP?
In that case, the usual advice is: start out as a freshman in engineering. If it turns out that you don’t like engineering, it’s typically easy to drop out and switch to something else (in fact, this is common – engineering BS programs often have high attrition). On the other hand, if you start in some other field, it may be difficult or impossible to switch into engineering later, especially if you want to graduate in four years.
If you aren’t certain, you are still better off starting in engineering. Engineering requires a large number of specific courses that have specific prerequisite and sequence dependencies. It is more difficult to transfer into engineering from physical science than the other way around.
But there are students who do what Bresdo’s daughter plans to do. And the link I provided in post #1 includes a link to graduate engineering programs to which Williams students have been accepted, and the names and programs are very impressive indeed. And it is cool, because the list indicates whether the student was in a 3:2 program beforehand or not— and most students were not, which shows they were successful getting into schools like MIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc. for advanced degrees in engineering coming straight out of a Williams liberal arts program. As Williams noted in that link, engineering graduate schools (like most other graduate schools) think highly of students coming from Williams. So I don’t think Engineer80’s “you’re not really an engineer” comment makes sense— anyone coming out of those top engineering masters and PhD programs is certainly an engineer.
That said, one could go to a college like Swarthmore and have the best of both worlds, so you would have to really feel that Williams is superior for you in all other regards, or really believe in the educational value of a pure liberal arts/sciences experience prior to your engineering training, to pick Williams. Clearly there are students like bresdo’s daughter, who turned down MIT for Williams, who have made that choice.
Or pick Amherst over Williams and take engineering classes at UMass or Smith. It still might take 5 years to get two degrees, but maybe not such a strict line in undergrad classes and grad classes.
@Greyking- No, I stand behind my comment. Without an undergraduate engineering degree you do not have the foundation interdisciplinary and iscipline specific engineering, engineering science, specialized labs, and design courses. Engineering graduate programs are specialized, they do not replace the undergrad foundation. A PhD in engineering for example (I have a PhD in EE and a BSEE, so I speak from experience) does not replace a BS.
The purpose of a master’s degree is to develop in depth knowledge of a specific area in engineering and, depending upon the student’s goals, develop research experience to do future PhD work. It builds upon the foundation of the undergraduate work but it does not itself provide that foundation.
A graduate engineering degree from any school (even MIT) does not superseed or replace undergraduate. The graduate program serves an entirely different purpose as I explained. Williams is doing a disservice to its students if they claim that it isn’t necessary to obtain an undergraduate engineering degree.
All ABET accredited undergraduate schools of engineering require a significant liberal arts component. One could of course take more humanities/liberal arts courses than the required minimum too if they so desire.
There has been a longstanding discussion in the engineering community about alternatives to the BS as the accredited professional degree. The obvious model is architecture, where there are two equivalent routes to professional licensure and practice:
- the NAAB-accredited BArch degree (this path normally takes 5 years), or
- a general pre-architecture bachelor's degree, followed by an NAAB-accredited MArch degree (this path normally takes 6 or 7 years total, depending on the amount of architecture covered in the bachelor's).
It is quite feasible to become a practicing architect by starting at a school like Williams and earning a professional MArch – the obvious drawback is that it takes longer than the BArch route. In theory, engineering could use the same model, and in fact ABET is trying to encourage this by extending their accreditation to engineering MS degrees. Historically, ABET accreditation was almost exclusively for BS degrees; ABET only accredited MS degrees at graduate-only institutions (i.e. no undergraduate programs). However, it is now possible for schools to offer ABET degrees at either the BS or MS levels, or both. The concept has been slow to catch on though.
I’m sure there are people out there who earned liberal arts degrees in science or math, then got an an engineering MS, and now work as engineers. It wouldn’t surprise me if this route becomes more common and feasible in the future, as it is now is in architecture. But under present conditions, I would agree that it is not the ideal pathway for an engineering career.
I’m planning on applying to Williams ED and MIT EA, is that a bad idea since Williams is binding and doesn’t have “enough” engineering program? or would it be fine, like TheGreyKing said?
Williams doesn’t have any engineering program. Williams can provide you with an undergraduate degree in physics, math, or computer science. But you can’t get any qualification in engineering there (unless you go through the 5-year program with Columbia or Dartmouth).
I can only repeat my previous recommendation:
Williams is a great choice for undergraduate physics or math; I personally would pick it over MIT for a bachelor’s degree in these fields. But I don’t think that Williams is a great choice for engineering – given the obvious fact that it has no engineering program. If you want engineering, MIT is the far better choice.
If you are undecided between science and engineering, then how are you going to make an informed decision at Williams? At Williams, there will be no engineering classes to take, no engineering students to hang out with, and no engineering profs to give you guidance. You will get terrific exposure to science and math, but literally zero exposure to engineering.
Perhaps you are reluctant to commit to engineering now, because you don’t know enough about it. That’s understandable – but after a couple of years at Williams, you still won’t know anything about it. So you will be in the same position.
If there is a “good chance” that you will want to go into engineering, then your best move is to enroll as a freshman engineering major at a school that offers engineering. That way, you will have the option of either (1) staying in the engineering program and getting an engineering bachelor’s in 4 years, or (2) leaving the engineering program and getting a science bachelor’s in 4 years. Furthermore, you will be able to make a well informed decision, because you will have taken classes, worked with students, and met with profs on both the science and engineering sides.
@Corbett - Back in the day the predecessor of ABET (Engineers’ Council for Professional Development or ECPD, which was the recognized accrediting agency for engineering schools until it became ABET in the late 1970s) tried to reform the engineering educational system such that a master’s degree in engineering would be recognized as the “first professional” degree in engineering. They did NOT (emphasis on “not”) however suggest that a master’s degree in engineering without first obtaining an undergraduate degree in engineering would be a replacement for or superseeding the latter. They recommended that to be a fully capable engineer, one should have both, one not being a substitute for the other. This plan for better or worse did not gain serious traction, as most students and their parents do not wish to spend more than four years in school and to be able to gain engineering employment as quickly as possible (today of course, the student debt situation makes that goal even more desirable).
ABET does not intend any accreditation given to a master’s degree (very few master’s degrees in engineering are ABET accredited, as it focuses primarily on undergraduate programs) does not imply the master’s degree is a substitute for an undergraduate degree. It merely signifies that the master’s curriculum meets an agreed upon standard of content and quality appropriate to a master’s program just as accreditation for an undergraduate program signifies that it meets a standard appropriate to an undergraduate program, not that they are interchangeable. They are a different set of standards.
A master’s degree in engineering is typically 30-33 credits. An undergraduate engineering curriculum typically is 128-145 credits, 80% of which is in engineering and underlying science courses. You cannot get the same degree of preparation from the former, obviously, just in terms of the course content.
An “engineer” with a non-engineering undergraduate degree and a graduate engineering degree will have been trained in a specific, focused, engineering application but will not have had the foundation engineering science (interdisciplinary across all engineering specialties), engineering economics/operations research, the many engineering foundation courses (thermodynamics, electronic circuits, fluid mechanics, strength of materials, systems theory, optics, energy conversion, statics, dynamics, and many others), and particularly the engineering design courses (that also span multiple disciplines in the first two years, then become disciplinary in the latter two) and the fourth year capstone design project. Master’s degrees frequently have no hands-on design work at all (they of course assume the applicant already has an undergraduate engineering degree in which the design courses were taken).
I’ve worked with architects and frankly it amuses me that their accrediting agency mandates an undergraduate degree in architecture to be 5 years. Architecture has nowhere near the level of mathematical and scientific rigor of engineering, and yet, they burden students with an additional year of schooling. Any major construction project is going to require qualified structural, geotechnical, electrical, and mechanical engineering design which is beyond the scope of traditional architects in any case. Does the “alternate route” in architecture (master’s degree) include the design and foundation coursework in architecture that a non-architectural undergraduate would not have had prior? I suspect it does. Again, engineering master’s degrees (or even PhDs) do not include this work as they are intended to build upon the foundation acquired in undergraduate studies.
I’ve worked for four major aerospace manufacturers. None of the engineers I worked with had a non-engineering undergraduate degree to the best of my knowledge and practically all of the engineering positions advertised by them specifically required a bachelor’s degree in engineering. Some required a master’s degree, but not in lieu of an undergraduate.
To the OP, in my opinion you are far better off attending an engineering school and starting out in engineering if you are considering engineering as a career. It will be harder to obtain an engineering job (and get into an engineering graduate school) without an undergraduate engineering degree. Without the undergraduate degree you will likely also be shut out of good opportunities with federal and state agencies, and it will be difficult or impossible to obtain a state PE license if that is your desire. If you decide that engineering isn’t for you, you can always transfer to a science major which is easier than the reverse in general. If you decide to start out in non-engineering do consider the 3-2 programs (though you have to contend with an extra year in school, but at least you get an actual undergraduate engineering degree). If an extra year is doable, you may consider the co-op programs in engineering schools, in which you spend one year (not consecutive semesters, usually) working in an internship in an engineering capacity (you pay tuition only for four years). The work experience is considered more valuable by employers than the liberal arts BA degree you would get as a result of a 3-2 program (which costs you five years of tuition).
Hope this helps and best to you in your academic endeavors!
Regards,
Michael, Ph.D., P.E., Consulting Aerospace Engineer
Look at Olin. You won’t get smaller than that. In addition, you can take classes at Babson and Wellesley College ( even if you are male). This will give you the small school feeling you want and the engineering background you need without additional years. Olin is like Williams, highly competitive in terms of entrance. If you look at their web site you will see that their teaching staff often pulls professors from MIT and other schools because they want to teach at Olin. It’s new so it doesn’t appear on all radars. If my kiddos were going into Engineering and wanted a small schools I’d say look at Olin and Harvey Mudd.
Indeed I know one personally, he’s in Houston at NASA presently, working as an engineer. Physics was his undergrad degree.
As an aside, I do not think Amherst with engineering classes at Smith or UMass is an option @twoinanddone . Generally the Amherst registrar will not grant credit for “pre-professional” courses, including engineering, with rare exceptions.
@geekgurl , strongly consider LACs and other small schools with engineering.
Smith
Swarthmore
Olin
Or if there is time, do a summer program in engineering. Or take a pre-eng CC class or something to give you an idea. I think engineering is sort of the default major rec for people who are good at math/science.
This may be true, but it is a bit out of date. Today, ABET does (emphasis on “does”) recognize that a master’s degree in engineering can meet accreditation requirements without first obtaining an undergraduate degree in engineering. This is stated explicitly in ABET’s current “FAQ for Master’s Level Engineering Programs Seeking Accreditation”:
In practice, are such ABET-accredited MS degrees common? No, which is why I don't recommend this pathway. But in theory, ABET accepts the concept.I’m sure the vast majority of engineers in all traditional engineering fields have ABET BS engineering degrees. I have worked for civil consulting firms and do know of exceptions, but they are rare, which is why I don’t recommend this pathway.
@Corbett - an engineering master’s degree can meet the ABET requirements FOR A MASTER’S DEGREE - not the same requirements as for an undergraduate degree. If some employers are willing to hire people who did not have the foundation engineering education, which to my mind is a prerequisite to do engineering work effectively - that is of course their business. I won’t hire them, and there are many that share this view I am certain. I suspect as master’s level EAC/ABET, etc. accreditation becomes more common, the “may be possible” will be revised. I do not agree that as currently given, a master’s degree is a replacement or substitute for a bachelor’s degree.
How an EAC/ABET believe that without the fundamental coursework discussed in the previous posts one is as prepared to do engineering work as one who does have that training? If that is really true accreditation loses its value, quite frankly. What one is saying effectively is that you can “be an engineer” not having done any design work as part of your training or being educated in the underlying fundamental applied science on which engineering is based. Do they - and you - really believe that? So, you would then feel comfortable riding in an airplane “designed” by someone who never studied fluid dynamics or strength of materials? Drive on a bridge that was the product of someone who never took the basic structural engineering courses? Really now.
@Engineer80 Read the quoted ABET FAQ again:
The ABET FAQ indicate that an individual with an ABET engineering BS would have a “relatively straightforward” path to an ABET engineering MS. The implication is that the path would be less “straightforward” for an individual without an ABET engineering BS. I would assume that the path to the MS for the latter individual would take longer, because of the need to make up undergraduate engineering classes along the way. But if that happens, then what’s the problem?
Suppose you were an undergraduate chemistry major. There are many non-chemistry professional careers that are open to you – you could still go to architecture school for an MArch, or to a law school for a JD, or to a medical school for an MD. Right?
But if it is agreed that a chemistry major can be prepared for professional practice in architecture or tort law or neurosurgery via grad school – then why would it be impossible to prepare a chemistry major to practice chemical engineering via grad school?
I’ll acknowledge that this pathway isn’t well developed at the present time, and so I don’t recommend it. But I think it’s feasible in principle, and so does ABET.