Majors at West Point

Has anyone seen a breakdown of percentage of people who choose each major at USMA? I know most are engineering majors. I want to be an army officer first and foremost. I thought I wanted to major in engineering but for a while now I have been thinking about switching my major to English or History. Also lately all of my extra curriculars have been in the area of English and History. (IE Model UN, Scholastic Bowl, Newspaper staff) Will this hurt my chances of admission? In other words is there preferential treatment with regards to admission based on your declared major? Is there preferential treatment with regards to admissions based on extracurriculars that are science based rather than liberal arts based?

There is probably data directly from West Point on this topic but I know some information can be found if you search West Point on collegeboard and go under the majors section. It breaks it down into categories. Hope this helps.

2Steaktacos said:

Has anyone seen a breakdown of percentage of people who choose each major at USMA? Also lately all of my extra curriculars have been in the area of English and History. (IE Model UN, Scholastic Bowl, Newspaper staff) Will this hurt my chances of admission? In other words is there preferential treatment with regards to admission based on your declared major? Is there preferential treatment with regards to admissions based on extracurriculars that are science based rather than liberal arts based?

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I know the major breakdown exists, but am having trouble finding it (it is buried on a sharepoint somewhere). I will get it to you if/when I get my hands on it.

As for your extracurriculars, admissions does not privilege math/science extracurriculars over others.
- You do not declare a major when applying, so Admissions has nothing to compare your extracurriculars to
- USMA's main rep is as an engineering school, however, my guesstimation would be that at least half of cadets do not major in engineering. The SOSH (social sciences), History, and English Departments here are stellar.

There is no mention of majors when applying. You choose your major in your second year. Don't even worry about it yet, you will be introduced to many choices when you are there.

I would imagine you have the most technically educated History/English majors, given the requisite Calculus, Physics, and Chemistry.

SonNo2of4 said:

I would imagine you have the most technically educated History/English majors, given the requisite Calculus, Physics, and Chemistry.

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I would imagine you're right. I spoke with USMA's admissions officer a couple days ago, and at some point during our conversation he mentioned that all cadets at USMA must minor in engineering (unless they're an engineering major, obviously). For example, he double majored in Arabic and International Relations (if I remember correctly) but also minored in Electrical Engineering.

SonNo2of4 said:

I would imagine you have the most technically educated History/English majors, given the requisite Calculus, Physics, and Chemistry.

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Good point. There is no BA degree offered at any of the Academies. By Congressional mandate in either 1930 or 1933 (get's confusing), they are all technical colleges. A Bachelor of Science degree at the Academies, and most colleges, requires at minimum foundation of a year each of Calculus, Chemistry and calculus-based Physics. That is why the Admissions Committees as all of the Academies wants to see Calculus, Physics and Chemistry on the High School transcript, and why the Math SAT/ACT portion is weighted more highly than the English/CR section.

I'm currently a plebe. If there's one thing they stress here, it's to choose what you love most for your major. You get to put in preferences for branch choice, and for your post, but the one thing you get to choose is your major. I won't declare until next year, but I've been advised to choose whatever I wouldn't mind studying at 1:00 in the morning. I'm torn between engineering and social sciences also. No idea where I'll end up. But since West Point pretty much owns the rest of you, they really do leave it up to you to choose your major. So don't worry about it too much now (although it is fun to think about), just focus on applying and preparing for the things they do want, like fitness, and getting everything you can out of high school, because I definitely started that too late. Oh, and as for extracurriculars, at least in my experience, they just wanted to see leadership; whether it was in science or not didn't seem too matter much.