ESS 706: Changing majors

Laura Vogt:
Hello, thank you for joining me for the Not So Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. I’m your host, Laura Vogt, the Associate Director of Marketing and communications in the College of Engineering. It’s another week and we’re here to talk about a topic that advisors have been fielding questions about since admissions were released: changing majors. And so this week we’re talking with two folks from Engineering student Services, Sharon Mueller, the director of advising and policy who we’ve met before, and Kendra Van Nyhuis and then Academic Advisor. So thank you both for being here today. Sharon, can you remind folks about what your role in ESS is?

Sharon Mueller:
Sure. So like Laura mentioned, I’m Sharon Mueller and I’m the director of Advising and Policy in Engineering Student services. So basically I’m over all of the advisors.

Laura Vogt:
Well thank you again for being our guest this week. And Kendra, can you tell us more about your role at ESS and maybe a little bit about yourself?

Kendra Van Nyhuis:
Sure, yeah. I’m Kendra Van Nyhuis. I am an academic advisor in ESS and so I advise students who are EECS majors with last names A through GI and I also advise engineering physics majors.

Laura Vogt:
Well thank you so much for being here today and Kendra, welcome to your first podcast. Is this information that we’re going over today going to be the same for students who are not currently in the College of Engineering?

Kendra Van Nyhuis:
No, it is not. Change of major is different from change of college. So if you are currently in the College of Engineering, you are able to change majors, with certain stipulations of course. If you’re currently not in the College of Engineering, you would have to follow the change of college policies which are also able to be found on our website to be able to change into a major in engineering.

Laura Vogt:
Thank you. I know that it doesn’t seem like it should be a difference just to anybody that’s looking in, but there’s definitely a difference. So who can change majors in the College of Engineering?

Sharon Mueller:
So this sort of follows up to what Kendra was just saying. So students who have been admitted to the College of Engineering may be able to change their major within the College of Engineering. And I just want to point out that students admitted as engineering undeclared don’t actually come in with a major, they’re in the College of Engineering, but they currently don’t have a major. So those students, I’m just going to mention at the top are a little different because they’re not actually changing major, they’re just declaring a major. And so the criteria are different for them. And I’ll just mention that engineering undeclared students, they just need a 2.0 in order to declare a major. And then they may need to finish one or two semesters depending on which major they want to declare. So I’m just going to get that out of the way because that’s their only criteria. For students who actually came in with a declared major in engineering, there are certain benchmarks they have to hit in order to change their major and that’s what we’re really going to focus on more in this podcast.

Laura Vogt:
And a lot of those undeclared students have already been talking with their advisor and making those plans.

Sharon Mueller:
That’s right. Yeah. So the engineering undeclared advisor is Joey. And when those students, by the way, they’re all freshmen because the transfer students come undeclared. So the group of engineering undeclareds we have are all freshmen. And when they’ve gone through GBA, they’ve kind of had to narrow down a little bit which majors they might want to pursue because it will make a difference in which courses they take their first semester. But that’s why Joey works really closely with them because they came in undeclared for a reason. So we want to make sure that we can balance their course loads so that they’re kind of maybe working towards one or two, possibly three majors to begin with just to try them out. So yeah, they should have already done GBA. By the way, that was due yesterday for freshmen. Well yesterday meaning June 20th because we’re recording this on June 21st. So freshmen, by the time they hear this, should definitely have finished GBA. And they’ll work really closely with Joey on getting that schedule set for the fall.

Laura Vogt:
So what majors in the college of Engineering are available for students to change into?

Sharon Mueller:
So actually all of the majors are theoretically available for students to change into. They do have different deadlines. Some of them… Most of them have the same deadline. They definitely have different criteria, but in theory, they are all available for students to change major too.

Laura Vogt:
And I know we already said that transfer students aren’t able to change major, but there’s a little bit of a thing that they could do there if they wanted to do a joint major?

Sharon Mueller:
So transfer students who have all come in with a major cannot change their major in engineering. Of course they can leave engineering if they absolutely hate engineering, we hope they choose to stay, but they just don’t have the option to change majors within engineering with one exception. And that is if you are a transfer student and you’ve come into a major that is also part of a joint major. I’m going to give an example. Let’s say you came in EECS, but you are thinking that you’re sort of interested also in material science and engineering. There is an EECS material science and engineering joint major. It is one major, it’s not a double major. It’s very heavily focused on the electrical engineering side for the EECS part.
So let’s say an each student comes in and they decide, “Oh, actually I would be interested in doing that joint major,” that’s the only exception is they could change to a joint major that’s still within the College of Engineering. There are six joint majors that are offered, and so students have to have come in a major that’s part of the joint, if that makes sense. So that could mean a bioengineering student who comes in maybe would want to pursue bioengineering and material science and engineering joint major. But that’s the only exception for the change of major. They couldn’t change from a single major to a different single major.

Laura Vogt:
And the joint majors are definitely open to the first year students as well, and they follow kind of the same deadlines as…

Sharon Mueller:
That’s true. So the transfer students basically have a year to decide if they want to switch to the joint major, whereas the students who are admitted as freshmen to change to any major within engineering, including the joint majors, they actually have two years to do that.

Laura Vogt:
Excellent. I’m glad that that’s still open to transfer students. While we’re talking about the joint major, one of the things that I want to make sure is that they understand what the difference is between a joint major and a simultaneous degree.

Sharon Mueller:
So that can be really confusing because we have students who are in the joint major, we might have other students who are doing double majors and then we might have students who are doing a simultaneous degree. So the difference between those are that a joint major is, it’s sort of a condensed version of both of the majors. It kind of takes the core courses from both of the disciplines in a cohesive way and meshes them together. So it’s only one major, but it is at the intersection of two different disciplines. A double major would be two majors in the college of engineering. Transfer students would not be eligible for a double major.
Freshmen could certainly try to pursue that. That means that they’re essentially doing all the requirements for both majors. There are some possible overlaps that could be approved, but they would have to work closely with their advisor on that. And then a simultaneous degree, this is actually open to both freshmen and transfer students. If they started in the college of engineering, it means they’re adding a major in a different college. So it would be someone who’s maybe pursuing mechanical engineering, which is in the College of Engineering, and then they might want to add on maybe math in the College of Letters and Science. So that’s two majors in two different colleges, and that’s called a simultaneous degree.

Laura Vogt:
And I know this is going to be a theme throughout the podcast, but if you have questions or concerns to ask your advisor.

Sharon Mueller:
Definitely.

Laura Vogt:
Which brings us to our next question, which is what is the first thing students should do if they want to change a major?

Kendra Van Nyhuis:
They should definitely talk to their ESS advisor, talk to your ESS advisor as soon as possible. Even if you’re just kind of thinking about it, you’re not sure or you want to know more about it’s really important to let your ESS advisor know right away. I feel like sometimes my students kind of hint at it or kind of don’t want to admit that they want to change majors until they finally decide they do. And that’s kind of a dangerous thing sometimes because as we’re going to talk about later with the criteria, it is unfortunately easy to make yourself ineligible to change your major. And so if you’re talking to your ESS advisor early and often, you can make sure to make a plan with them so that you can both be making progress in your current major if you decide to stay with your current major, and keep yourself eligible to change majors or kind of know what the criteria are you need to meet to change to the majors that you might be interested in changing to.
So it’s important to just be very transparent with your advisor. I think some students are nervous about how their advisor’s going to react to them wanting to change majors, especially very early on. And to be frank with you, we will be very blunt about the difficulties or the hurdles you’re going to have to jump through, the criteria you need to meet. So we will be very straightforward with you on that, so be prepared for that. But we want to know what you want to do so we can make sure to give you the best tools possible to be able to pursue what you might want to pursue.

Laura Vogt:
So what does the process actually entail?

Sharon Mueller:
Yeah, so actually Kendra mentioned, step one is you have to talk to your ESS advisor, and you just have to let them know what’s on your mind. If it’s something you’re just vaguely thinking about or something you are absolutely determined to do, either way, as Kendra mentioned, it’s very easy to make yourself ineligible. And we want to help you. We want students to be in the major they want to be in, but the only way we can do that is if there’s very open communication so that we can ensure that you remain eligible. So yeah, step one is definitely talk to your ESS advisor, that your ESS advisor can talk to you about the minimum criteria. And I think Kendra’s going to touch on that in a minute. And then once you meet those minimum criteria, and you have hopefully remained eligible to change your major, then it’s a pretty simple form, some forms that you fill out. And so yeah, it’s a multiple step process, but always step one has to be talking to your ESS advisor

Laura Vogt:
Because this isn’t something where you can be like, “Well, I’m going to change my major tomorrow.”

Sharon Mueller:
Right. It definitely requires planning, intricate planning in some cases. So that’s why it’s essential to just be really transparent with your ESS advisor, and to ensure that you’re doing the right thing to, on the one hand remain eligible, and on the other hand ensure that you’re meeting maybe the course requirements and the grade requirements.

Laura Vogt:
So what are these minimum criteria the students need to know about?

Kendra Van Nyhuis:
So for every major, there are specific GPA criteria that students need to meet. It’s different for every major, which is again why you should talk to your ESS advisor because they have all of that information about what those GPA a requirements will be. For all changes of major, you need to have completed at least one semester at Berkeley. For some of them you actually do need to complete two semesters before you’re allowed to change. So in that first year, you need to be kind of, like you said, planning out what you’re taking to make sure that you’re going to meet those criteria to change. At the same time, another criteria to be able to change majors is that you need to be making adequate progress in your current major as well. So that means that you need to be taking at least two technical courses towards major requirements that are currently unsatisfied in order to make progress in your current major.
And then some majors also have criteria that you need to be taking a certain number of classes in that major to be able to change to the major. So that’s one of the points where it gets to be difficult is that you might need to be taking three technicals sometimes to get the technicals you need for the current major and the change of major. And then on top of that, you need to be getting a certain GPA to be able to change majors, so that also makes it difficult. And then like we talked about earlier, the deadline for most change of majors is before your fifth semester begins. The one exception that would probably be aerospace, which has a different application process and timeline to it, so you should talk to your ESS advisor about the specific deadline for the aerospace change of major.

Laura Vogt:
And one of the things that you just said made me think about we’re really pushing for this first semester for students to not overload themselves. So that’s got to be a big reason why, one, you’re not changing your major before you walk into the door, you’ve got to get through that first semester. But talking to your advisor to make those plans for later on because you do have to take more classes in order to make it happen.

Kendra Van Nyhuis:
Exactly. And there are some times where you can kind of make that work. Like we said, for the first semester, we almost always recommend two technicals and a humanities course, 12 to 14 units. If you can find a technical where it’s counting towards your current major and also counting towards your possible change of major, that’s the ideal scenario for first semester is to find a way to keep that tech load a little lower. And then from there we can plan your next semester during the fall to make sure that you’re still, again, making progress in current major but also hitting any course requirements for the change of major.

Laura Vogt:
And for these first year students, a lot of that the math class is going to count for both, a lot of times your science or… Is it called science class when it’s chemistry?

Kendra Van Nyhuis:
Yeah, natural science.

Laura Vogt:
There you go. I don’t know why I’ve never actually thought about what it’s called. I just always talk about what the classes are. So we talked about the deadline to change majors is your fifth semester. Can students apply to change their major multiple times?

Sharon Mueller:
I suppose in some cases, possibly. If a student however wants to change to the EECS major, electrical engineering computer sciences, that has to be their first change of major. So let’s say someone comes in as mechanical engineering and their goal is to be an EECS student, they have to change directly from mechanical engineering to EECS. They couldn’t go to mechanical engineering to something else and then say, “Oh actually I want to be EECS.” So if they want to be EECS, it has to be their first change of major.
If a student is a little bit indecisive or maybe is considering two different majors, it’s better if they just try to make that decision and then change only once because they could get rather far behind the more they try to switch around. And honestly that’s kind of an unusual scenario to be switching that much because it becomes quite challenging to do that. Once you’re kind of into your fourth semester, you’ve got to be pretty settled on the major that you’re going to be pursuing. So even though the deadline is before the fifth semester, even waiting until your fourth semester can kind of be challenging to switch at that point.

Laura Vogt:
Because you’re not going to get an extra semester for changing major, right?

Sharon Mueller:
That’s right, you’re not. You still have to finish within eight semesters. And the majors, like you said, there are a lot of courses that work for a lot of majors in the college that are the same. So a lot of the math courses are the same, a lot of the physics courses are the same. Where you start deviating might be with engineering. So a lot of majors for instance have Engineering Seven, so that can be a pretty safe bet for many of the majors. But other courses you’re pretty much starting to focus on your major. And for many majors that starts for semester. So if you decide semester three, “Oh, actually I want to be this other major,” if you haven’t taken those courses, you kind of have to catch up on that. So it can be really challenging to change multiple times because it just gets more and more challenging to squeeze everything into the eight semesters.
And like I mentioned, if your goal is to change to EECS, that has to be your first change of major. And in order to change to EECS, you have to have completed your first two semesters. So what Kendra was talking about, about making progress in your current major while also making yourself eligible for the EEKS major can become challenging for two semesters to do that. And that’s why working with your ESS advisor is really important because your ESS advisor might know, “Oh, you know what, this course counts for both, and so this would be a great option for you because it means you’re maintaining your progress in your current major, which is one of the criteria, and you’re making good progress on changing to this other major.” So working with your ESS advisor, it’s definitely to the student’s advantage to do that as soon as possible.

Laura Vogt:
Is there one piece advice that you have for students who are already wanting to change majors even if they haven’t started to take classes?

Kendra Van Nyhuis:
Yeah, that happens. There’s a span of time between the application process and the starting process where students start to look around and see different things. Or you hear about so-and-so or your roommate or somebody has a different major and maybe you want to do that instead. Definitely happens. So I think the two kind of spheres of information that I suggest students look at in these situations is the curriculum, the course-based parts of your major, and the application of your major. What do you do with your major? So sometimes you don’t get a good sense of what your major’s actually going to be like with a lot of the lower division coursework. As we were talking about earlier, a lot of it’s kind of math, sciences, coding and stuff, kind of base courses. So I often suggest looking at the upper division curriculum, the classes that are numbered 100 to 194, and look at the topics of the classes that you can take or that you’re required to take.
And what on there is interesting to you, what do you like, do you not like it? And then compare that to the upper division curriculum for other majors you might be interested in. Do these fit more with your interests? And especially as you’re taking the lower division curriculum, what in that is sparking interest and excitement for you? Is that continued into the upper division curriculum? That’s a good sign you’re in the right major. If it’s not or if the things that you’re interested in are more so in a different field, that’s where you might want to think a little bit about changing majors. But the other component of it is definitely the what do we do with this major. And I think a lot of students see certain majors and they’re like, “I’m not sure what to do with this major,” or, “I don’t think this is a marketable major.” And that’s not always true.
So I think one of the things you can definitely do is, we have a great career center on campus, you can talk to career counselors there or go to different fairs activities. There’s also often activities within specific majors. You’ll get departmental announcements about activities. And also student groups are a really great one. To plug for engineering physics, Epsilon Pi is a fantastic student group that you can use for resources about what your major is like, what other students are doing with your major, what kinds of things you can do after you graduate, the kinds of internships or research that other students are doing in these majors, just to give you a better sense of the overall kind of trajectory and directions that you can take with your major. And a lot of times students do that research and find that their current major actually would serve them well, even if it maybe not the expected or traditional major for a certain career field, there’s definitely still avenues to go in that direction. So I think those are the kinds of things to just start to look at when you’re thinking about changing major.

Laura Vogt:
And to talk about that a little bit more about learning about the different majors, I know the peer advisors have an event every year, I think, that lets you come in and do a round robin and talk to major students from other majors?

Sharon Mueller:
Yeah, that’s usually in the fall semester and I think it’s normally October or so, and I think it’s called Major Madness. And it’s basically upper division students from all the majors who are at booths, just answering questions for students who want to learn more about that major. There’s also a course. Let’s say someone comes in, they’re declared and they’re like, “Well, I’m industrial engineering operations research. I have no idea what that is. I don’t even know if I want to do that.” And they want to learn about other majors in engineering.
There is a course in the fall Engineering 92, it’s just a one unit seminar that’s pass/no pass. And that course is… It’s actually designed for engineering undeclared students, but any student can actually enroll in it. And in that course, faculty come in from all the different departments and talk about precisely that. Here’s what you learn about in our major, and here are the kind of jobs and industry you can pursue, here are possible graduate student paths you could take. So if someone has come in undeclared, but they’re just not sure, they’re welcome to enroll in Engineering 92 in the fall just to learn a little more about other engineering majors, in case they want to change their major.

Laura Vogt:
And then you also have decal, that student student run about getting to know engineering better?

Sharon Mueller:
That’s right, yeah. Yeah. So that is Engineering 98 and it’s called The Insider’s Guide to Berkeley Engineering. And that is also run by upper division engineering students. They have a website, it’s actually linked in GBA for students on… When they get to that last page with their course plan, there’s a link to Engineering 98 for students there. I know they’re still working on gathering instructors for it for the fall, so I don’t think it’s in the schedule yet because they’re trying to figure out rooms and times. And often with decal courses, in case anybody doesn’t know, those are courses taught by other students that have quite fun topics, so often with decal courses, they’re not settled until very close to the beginning of the fall semester. But students can go to the website, if they just Google engineering or E98.

Laura Vogt:
It’s e98.berkeley.edu.

Sharon Mueller:
Oh, well that’s easy. E98.berkeley.edu. So if they go to that website, it will be updated eventually. I think right now it hasn’t quite been updated yet, but it will be updated. They offer many different sections of that course. And it is a really good resource for new students because they have these other students who are teaching the course who really give them lots of tips about being a Berkeley engineer. And courses and majors, that’s all part of the discussion as well. So that’s also a really good resource for students who aren’t quite sure about their major.

Laura Vogt:
And so I’m going to make sure that we have a pretty robust list of links of everything that we’ve been talking about today in the podcast too, on the podcast page website, so that you can hopefully quickly find the information that you’re looking for. So is there anything about changing majors that we’ve missed?

Sharon Mueller:
I can’t really think of anything. Hopefully we were really clear that they need to talk to their ESS advisor. If they take nothing else from this podcast, that’s it, talk to your ESS advisor, because they can definitely get more specifics from their advisor about minimum criteria for the major they want to change to. And then minimum criteria for remaining eligible to change majors. So yes, if you heard nothing else, I hope that you’ve heard, “Please meet with your ESS advisor as soon as possible.”

Kendra Van Nyhuis:
And if you have any follow up questions or any specific concerns, I would love to hear them as an ESS advisor. So please, your ESS advisor would also love to hear, I’m speaking for everyone else, they would love to hear from you if you have any questions about this.

Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you both so much for being here today and talking about changing of majors.

Sharon Mueller:
Thank you. Thank you for having me again.

Kendra Van Nyhuis:
Yeah. And thanks for having me.

Laura Vogt:
And thank you to everyone for tuning in to the Not So Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. We’ll be back next week with enrollment tips from an ESS Peer advisor. Bye.