Does my choice of the 6 colleges affect my chances of getting Jacobs Scholar? I know I need to be an engineering major (which I’ll be) but I couldn’t find info about the schools. Thanks!
I can’t find anything that says it explicitly, but I highly doubt it. The School of Engineering awards the scholarship based on your high school achievement. I doubt it has anything to do with what college you select, and I can’t imagine why they would care.
As an example from another merit-based scholarship given by UCSD (with no application process, like the Jacobs Scholarship), the Regents Scholarship is awarded based on high school academic achievement. It has nothing to do with what college you select. In fact, one of the perks of being a Regents Scholar is that you get your first-choice college selection. How you rank the colleges has absolutely nothing to do with it, and I would suspect that the Jacobs scholarship operates the same way. Perhaps, getting the Jacobs scholarship influences what college you are assigned to (making it more likely to get your first choice college, for example), rather than the other way around.
Also, since you just rank your college selection (and are assigned one after you are admitted to UCSD by the school–you don’t always get your first college choice), I don’t even know if the Jacobs Scholarship would know what college you were assigned when they award the scholarships. The colleges are really just personal preference for the student (and many students just rank them randomly because they don’t bother to research the differences). I would imagine that the Jacobs Scholars program would be much more interested in selecting the best prospective engineering students without even looking at what college they selected since the point of the scholarship is to give incentive for talented students to attend UCSD.
@baktrax Thanks so much for your insightful response! It’s good to hear that it probably isn’t mandatory to choose Warren, although I am considering putting it as my first choice due to its association with engineering.
It definitely, definitely is not mandatory to choose Warren. 100% sure on that. The School of Engineering has no association with any of the 6 colleges. There would be zero reason for them to favor Warren students over any other college.
@baktrax Thanks for the clarification! I probably got confused because I’ve heard some rumors and that it is located close to Jacobs school of engineering.
But would you recommend Warren for a prospective chemical engineer major? I was debating Warren and Muir (for my first choice) because I heard Warren is good for engineers but Muir is easier to double major in.
Thanks so much for your help!
Take a look at the GE requirements for both colleges to decide which one you would rather do. This website http://provost.ucsd.edu/colleges/ can help you compare the colleges, but you can also just go to each college website. Really, either one would be fine. Just pick the one you like better.
Whether or not it is hard or difficult to double major is just determined by how many classes you have to take. Either Muir or Warren would probably be equal in your ability to double major. Warren lowers the number of GE requirements for engineering majors, but it is still comparable to the number of courses the Muir requires. Muir requires students to take 14 GE courses, while Warren requires engineering students to take 12 courses. Warren, however, requires some of those classes to be upper-division (which are typically more challenging courses), while all of Muir’s GE requirements can be fulfilled with lower-division classes. You can look at each school’s website to see what types of courses each college requires specifically.
Muir is typically known for being easier to double major in because they have a low number of GEs and their GEs are very flexible to suit your interests and such. But students can double major in any college, and Warren doesn’t have such an exorbitant number of classes that it would make it impossible. However, it’s going to be challenging in general to double major as an engineering major just because of the number of courses required of engineering students. I checked http://plans.ucsd.edu/ which has 4-year plans put together by the colleges that gives you a rough idea of the courseloads in any major and any college, and it looks both colleges have a total number of units as 183 (majors classes+GEs) and will both require full loads for many of your quarters at UCSD. This does not, however, account for any AP or transfer credit you will come in with. It will probably be rough trying to fit in another major and may require summer classes and the like. I’m not saying you can’t do it (especially if you have much of your lower-division requirements taken care of with AP and transfer credit), but just that you might not necessarily want to count on it too heavily. See how it goes with one major first, and work out a four-year-plan with both majors to see how do-able it is.
Also, yes, the Jacobs School of Engineering is physically within Warren college, but that doesn’t mean it has any sort of special connection to Warren. And I could say that about any department at UCSD. Since UCSD is physically divided into the six colleges, all of the departments are physically located in one college or another. But students of all majors are located in all colleges. The Jacobs School being in Warren doesn’t necessarily mean that all of your classes will be in Warren either. For example, I looked up the Chemical Engineering classes offered this fall, and there were classes whose lecture halls were located in Warren, Marshall, and Muir and that is just a fraction of the classes that you might take as a chemical engineering major. If you have to take a Chem lab, that will probably be in Revelle, and so on. Also, I wouldn’t worry too much about the location of classes, since you may move off campus after a year or two and then it won’t matter.
Warren has a reputation for having a lot of engineers probably because the Jacobs School is physically in Warren (which doesn’t really matter) and because they lower the GE requirements for engineering majors (which doesn’t necessarily make them any easier to complete than the GEs of other colleges). But to be honest, at this point, it has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Students hear that Warren has a lot of engineers or is the “engineering college” or is better for engineers, and they rank it first, regardless of whether or not any of that is actually true. There’s really no reason to say any other college is bad for engineers or isn’t just as good. Muir, for example, has about the same number of GEs (although, one could argue that they may be considered easier since they are all lower-division), and while the engineering department is not located physically in Muir, it is closer to the chemistry department (but remember the location of the department doesn’t determine where your classes are going to be, or anything else, really) and is a much more centrally located college than Warren (not to mention being closer to the beach!).
tl;dr Check the college’s websites and look at the GE requirements. Pick whichever one you like better. It really doesn’t matter. Either one will be absolutely fine.
@baktrax Thank you so much for taking all the time to provide so much information! I’ll read more into it and hopefully I’ll make up my mind by the deadline this month. I like how you called the engineering reputation of Warren a self-fulfilling prophecy-- I think that it is a big reason for people to select it, rumors and all! Thanks again for sharing your knowledge of UCSD here! It is so helpful!
@baktrax gave you very good advice. I would add I have never heard of an engineering student in a different college say they wished they were in Warren. By the time you are taking more than one engineering class you will unlikely still be living in Warren so the location may not be that helpful.
@FarWestCoast Thanks for offering your insight! I’ll be sure to do some more research so I can be satisfied with the college I choose (which will probably be Muir or Warren). I’m actually slightly leaning toward Warren because I anticipate taking higher level classes for the sake of learning anyway and fewer gen ed will give me more classes to a second major or research.
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