Yeah, this is the main issue for MechE & BioE. And pay $60K (OOS) to play the russian roulette. Seattle Times has a take on it. Looks like they merged CompE into ElecE from 2021 onwards.
Why don’t they only provide Engg Undeclared as the major in the application choices instead of specific engg major? What does it really mean specifying the BioE or MechE in tha app if there is going to be a secondary holistic application process a year later?
Also note the secondary app process is a catch-22. In the resume you would want to show BioE/MechE related ECs/internships to be selected for that major but then they expect the student to accept an alternate after amassing such interests. It feels weird.
Anyway S23 is interested in BioInformatics/BioComputationalE/ComputationalBio in the long run, he had applied for ACMS:Bio as the secondary choice at UW. We need to find out whether it is easier to move to ACMS:Bio or another pathway to MS in BioInformatics if one does not get selected to BioE after the freshman year.
We loved UW but didn’t apply last year for this exact reason. Their engineering major declaration process is idiotic. I would prefer if they simply made all engineering majors direct admits and provide a small change of major pathway between the majors.
UW admission made the process easy for themselves by constraining this and constraining that, and put a lot of stress for students applying for the school. Fortunately I don’t see other schools function this way.
They do that so less people (and less out of state people) will apply to Mechanical Engineering… I still think they should offer direct admission to a limited number of freshmen (competitive process)
Accepted In-State CS direct admit
3.79 GPA
Extracurriculars: national awards (x2) state awards (x3) for sport I do, cs internship at local company
not hook, not first-gen, not of color/disadvantaged
Worked hard on my personal essay
Re-used another essay for the supplement
From what I read in several forum, the WSA (Writing Skill Assessment) is a big factor, if you get WSA above 5, it can cover your GPA if it’s below 3.8. But you can take the WSA several times. I am also worried for my son because he is not directly admitted to Foster.
CS is pretty much 0%. Informatics is 25% (900 apps for 250 slots). The head of the dept for Informatics admissions wrote a very interesting article on medium in 2020 about the injustice of constrained major admissions.
We are in state and DS23 was rejected, so we don’t have a pony in this show anymore - but this craziness of secondary admit process would have been enough for him to decline admission (he was prepared to do that) even with the nice in state price tag. If I was OOS with other more sane and affordable options I would not attend UW as a first year - what in the world is the benefit? Come back as a transfer or for grad school.