#70: Switching from Engineering to Business

Notre Dame Students have high expectations.  They expect a lot out of their professors: hoping for slides to be put online and class notes to be printed out.  They expect a lot from their Thursday nights: hoping for plenty of drinking and time to see all of their friends.  They expect a lot from their football team: a national championship or bust.  Most of all, however, Notre Dame Students expect a lot out of themselves.

Expecting a lot from themselves, students enter the University of Notre Dame expecting to participate in difficult and promising majors.  They state their intention to major in Pre-Med or Architecture or Science or Engineering knowing that these majors are complicated, and knowing that their completion will be challenging. 

Soon enough, however, Notre Dame Students will switch their major from Engineering (or a similarly taxing major) to Business (or a similarly less complicated major).

There are many reasons for this traditional switch in major (which usually comes in the second or third semester).  Some of these students had been originally pressured by their parents to do something they don’t want to do (and then rebel, because they are in college).  Many students were led to believe that their strengths were in math and science simply because they were great at these subjects in high school.  Other students simply do not know what they want to do with their life when they are 18 years old.

The most important reason, however, that students change their majors from engineering to business is so that these students have plenty of time to do things that are SO college at night and on the weekends (see #11).  While engineering classes have labs on Friday afternoons (and pre-med classes have their own things to do then), most business classes allow students to have wide open schedules on these Friday afternoons (and for upperclassmen, all of Friday) so that they can start their weekend off right.

Furthermore, the amount of work that business students have (and the level of attentiveness these students need for their classes) allow these students to spend many weeknights doing nothing but watching television and playing drinking games.  Once students realize that these are the things they want to take away from their college experience, they realize that it is time to change majors.

This major switch is exemplified by the science-business and math-business majors that appear for many sophomores.  These majors are briefly declared by many students who believe they need a change, but want to keep up the appearance that they are more academic than their business counterparts.  Usually they hold this distinction over the heads of their business-only friends for a semester or two pretending that they might actually go to med school until they realize the easier work load of a business major is the right way to go, and they declare a business-only major.

Overall, changing from engineering to a business major is one of the most popular major switches at the University of Notre Dame, a switch that is always taken lightly.