<p>There is no “acceptance” into a major at this point - it is his intended major not declared. Pitt doesn’t limit how many students enter each engineering discipline when they declare major at the end of freshman yr - so you don’t have to worry about “additional criteria” to choose ME at that point. What is great about the program is that first yr seminar exposes freshman engineers to what each discipline is about, career options, what research is being done. It helps the undecided, choose a path with some understanding of that choice as opposed to some HS kids who say “I going to major in engineering” without much understanding of what that means. Classes are large but not enormous - 120 or so in most of those frosh classes - with seminar being (at least in part) a smaller cohort (12-25). All those big classes have recitations which are much smaller. Now, if your son is in honors college, he can also take honors versions of those freshman courses, they are more in depth, not get weighted any differently into the GPA, but have a smaller class size which can be nice. </p>