Hello all. I'm currently a junior in high school and am planning ahead for my future.
I was wondering if I could receive the 4-year ROTC scholarship (for any branch) and do a double major?
I'm planning on mechanical engineering and either go pharmacy or biomedical engineering.
Any thoughts or experiences? Thanks
Lots of others have chimed in, here is the unclear answer that you need to know:
It depends entirely upon the institution and the majors. Here is a list of factors that affect the possibility.
1) The degree requirements for each major. As others have mentioned, related majors are often easier to do this way.
2) Credits you start with. AP and other credits accumulated during your HS years CAN help with this. Some institutions use them as placement only (you still have to earn X credits at that institution in that field regardless of where you start). Others give you the full credit. These are actually most useful in non-major core requirements (freshman English for technical majors, Calculus for liberal arts types).
3) For foreign language 2nd majors, many institutions will allow placement exams to lop off the early year sequences.
4) For most public institutions, just getting the required courses in for a single major in 4 years is a scheduling nightmare, as budgets are squeezed to the point where not enough sections of classes are offered to satisfy everyone who wants to take them.
5) The institutions policies towards ROTC courses as credits towards degree and/or maximum credits taken in a term. This can be a problem both ways. Many institutions treat ROTC credits like elective with no credit toward degree requirements. On top of that, many institutions limit how many credits you can take in a term (18 is common). Double majors almost always take more than the standard 120 credits (15 per term * 8 terms). Given that your ROTC will occupy 12 to 18 credits (depending upon school), adding another 15 to 24 credits for a 2nd major puts you in a situation where you are taking 18-20 credits a term. For a high school student 20 hours of class per week sounds like a vacation, but the independent hours reading, writing papers, etc. typically run 2 hours for every hour in class. This turns that 20 hours of class into a 60 hour work week.
If you really want to find out whether a double major is possible, I would start by getting the course catalog for a school you are interested in and then plotting out the degree requirements over a 4 year schedule. Then get the class schedule for a full year and see if you can make it work with the course offerings as laid out during a year (try your frosh schedule first, then try your soph schedule, etc.). This will tell you if it is THEORETICALLY possible (odds are that more senior students will get the class spots you want in your early years).
For most schools, this information is publicly available on their websites. I suspect you will spend upwards of 8-16 hours doing this. The good new is that this will get you ready to fill out your 104R which is required every term to show how you intend to complete your degree on time.
From my daughter's experience, the plans change every term based upon what is actually available for her to enroll in. For example, this term (she is a Jr), she is only taking 2 courses in her major requirement and 4 courses in General Ed and ROTC. She would have rather taken more courses in her major field, but they were either filled (by seniors), weren't offered, or had scheduling conflicts with ROTC or the other courses she could get in her major field. She was barely able to piece together 15 credits for next term that fulfilled her degree requirements for similar reasons.
The good news is that she has kept a course load that will allow her to take on 12 credit hours both terms of her senior year. The bad news is that she has very little flexibility in those courses. Every credit she has taken so far has gone towards a major or degree requirement except for ROTC (which only counts for the 120 credit hours required for any degree).
Point here is that getting 1 major can be difficult in 4 years. You need to have a very accommodating school and a lot of built in advantages to make a double major work.
BTW, I have spent many years working in higher education myself specifically in student records management.
