Cal Poly’s non-standardized change-of-major process creates problems for students who feel forced into their majors.
Suha Saya
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It was the policy she had a problem with, not the people.
Cal Poly wine and viticulture freshman Kinsie Prokopakis withdrew from her classes and unregistered from University Housing when worry struck her about switching her major to engineering.
“I was worried that my GPA would go down so drastically trying to get into engineering classes here that I wouldn’t get into any colleges for engineering,” she said. “I didn’t want this to be a waste of time.”
But after serious consideration, she decided to take the risk anyway.
“For one, I got a 4.0 my first quarter,” Prokopakis said. “Engineering here is such a good opportunity, and some college will accept me for engineering no matter what.”
Others — with grade point averages plummeting — aren’t so lucky.
But Shannon Stephens, director of Mustang Success Center, said grades aren’t the entirety of evaluation when changing majors.
“Students need to learn to navigate the system,” he said. “And that doesn’t mean cheating the system — that’s finding the right people on campus to help you.
“If your grades aren’t good because you’re in a major that you don’t like and don’t excel in, you have to approach that conversation tactically,” Stephens added.
Stephens stressed the impact of in-person conversations with advisers rather than email conversations.
“That one-on-one conversation will show that you’re passionate and serious about what you want, and you have to identify those people on campus that have the ability to help,” he said.
As for time, Stephens admitted that it can be a lengthy process. But he indicated it doesn’t have to be that way for every student.
“This process is called an Individualized Change of Major Agreement (ICMA) for a reason,” he said. “It’s personalized according to the students’ needs and what college they want to switch into.”
Because each college has its own culture, each major is impacted to different levels, Stephens said.
“If a major is very impacted, the professor to faculty ratio is maxed out,” he said. “So they don’t have as much room in that major as others.”
But departments in the colleges are telling students which classes they’d like them to take, and are showing them how to be successful in that particular major, he said.
“That’s up to the departments to find out how much space there is, based on how much availability they have coming in and going out,” Stephens said.
Cem Sunata, university registrar, stressed the dynamic nature of the process.
“Each department is trying to keep their capacities somewhat leveled,” Sunata said. “If departments admit everyone, they’re going to make it a real disservice to students that are admitted because they can’t serve them well … students won’t find major classes that they want to get admitted in, and then they’ll start complaining that they can’t get into classes.”
Though some impacted majors might ask students to maintain a certain GPA before switching, Stephens said it’s not a dead end.
That doesn’t mean there’s not another major you can use to get to the endpoint you want, he said.
“Folks like myself or other advisors on campus can talk to students about that and take away the anxiety of ‘I can’t get the job I want if I’m not in this major,’” he said. “The reality is that’s not always true.”
If students don’t meet the terms of their ICMA at the end of the process, they go back to their original major, he said.
But to Stephens, this shouldn’t be a big problem as long as students talk to the right advisors.
“Classes can be taken to go towards both degrees at the same time,” he said.
Sunata also said he believes the change of majors policy itself is a standardized one.
“Students are required to declare a major upon entry; we do this in case a student might want to circumvent the system just for the sake of getting into Cal Poly,” he said.
That’s also why students can’t change majors the first quarter of their freshman year, he said.
Sunata did, however, recognize the problems that come with having impacted majors.
“I can see the challenge of getting into engineering,” Sunata said. “It’s hard for students to go through meeting certain conditions in the change of major policy if there are no spots in the major itself.”
Stephens agreed the process can get complicated because departments and colleges are left to administer the policy to some degree.
“It’s a little bit muddy; we have a university policy that seems relatively clear,” he said. “But some colleges and departments will differ in how they apply the university policy.”
Prokopakis, who looked to transfer into engineering, said she’s found other colleges won’t let students declare a major until they have a certain standing or certain GPA.
“My sister who goes to (University of California) Santa Cruz couldn’t declare a major in bioengineering until her junior year — which, in my opinion, is good, because people can try stuff out,” she said. “I understand the argument that if people have time to try things out it may take them longer to graduate, but at the same time, it’s going to take me five to six years to graduate because of this change-of-major issue.”
But Associate Vice Provost for University Advising Beth Miller said there are downsides to other schools’ change-of-major systems.
“Once you get there and you take all those classes, what happens if you still can’t get into the major when it’s time to declare? It’s not a perfect world,” she said. “The process is complex — that’s just how it is.”
Miller, however, said the advising community is looking into creating a starting point for everyone.
“We’re proposing that all students would start with a change of major workshop, and then we’ll move forward to getting students to where they want to go,” she said. “We understand that we expect 17-year-olds to know what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives. But we want to make sure they’re not jumping ship either.”