William and Mary Engineering

<p>I liked William and Mary a lot but they don't offer an engineering major, however they do have a program where you take physics at W&M for 2 years then transfer to Columbia University for 3 years and get an engineering degree there. I will not have a chance to tour Columbia and I was just wondering if anyone has tried this program or has been to Columbia and how they liked it!
Thanks!</p>

<p>In general, OP, these engineering transfer programs are frowned upon on CC. People feel that too often students in the programs end up not transferring to the engg school because they don’t want to leave their friends and have to go off to find new friends at the engg school. There is also the matter of expense.</p>

<p>I don’t have any experience with any of these programs, however. You might want to direct your question to the W&M college forum for more specific answers.</p>

<p>It’s either 3 or 4 years at WM, then 2 at Columbia. Apparently many who do this go directly into Masters’ programs for engineering. You would pay Columbia tuition while at Columbia. It is also not unusual to to go elsewhere directly into an engineering Ph.D. program. You basically need to complete all your degree requirements at WM first, with minimum grades; so while I don’t see anything particularly bad about this option, it just seems to formalize what some graduates are doing anyway.</p>

<p>My daughter investigated these programs at Emory and a few other schools, and they sound appealing, but when she tried to get contacts for any students who actually did them so she could talk to them about the pros and cons we found out that no school could give us names of people to talk to or even numbers of kids who participated in these programs. In the end she picked WashU which has many other strong programs across the board - so she could easily double major or get out of engineering if it didn’t appeal. Loves it there. Check with W&M to see if there are any kids to talk to who have done it. </p>