Comprehension or Time Efficiency?

[oiprocs]

I have 2 options in regards to completing my degree.

Scenario A)
Take 3 engineering classes per quarter for 3 years, not including summer session.

Scenario B)
Take 4 engineering classes per quarter for 2 years, including 4 classes in 2 different summer sessions.

What would be the smarter choice? Staying for another year will incur more loans on my behalf but I'll have more time to find an internship/work experience, while taking 4 classes in a quarter will get rid of that extra year but possibly result in a lack of a strong comprehension of the material. Out of the all the classes I need, 12 are EE, and 12 are CS (I have no experience in either field, save for calculus, physics, etc.). Also, I have thus far spent 3 years in school.

 

[TuxDave]

Personally if you're not finding financial hardships from the loans, I would say do the route that makes you learn more. Paying off the loan is easy once you graduate and get a job.

 

[oiprocs]

Well all my loans are deferred, so I don't have to pay them back until I graduate. I'm just getting this feeling that I SHOULD be done within 5 years, even though I know it matters more what you know/who you know/how well you know it, rather than how quickly you finished.

 

[Aluvus]

What is a typical graduation time for people in your major at your school? If 4 years is normal, then you're going to have to explain to potential employers why you took longer. A good answer to that is "I wanted to learn as much as I could" (provided you really did learn something and can show it), even if you end up on a 6 year plan. A bad answer is "I slacked off for 3 years and then crammed in the last 2". If you're in this situation because of changing majors, that may offer some explanation. But even in that case, being at the 3 year mark with nothing in these topics seems... odd. Is this a switch to a double major?

The summer thing is also a big factor. Good internships can solve a lot of the problems caused by being in school an extra year (you don't have to explain yourself so much in interviews, and the leg up to your career may help you deal with student loans faster). You might even want to do a co-op and miss a quarter; this provides good experience and a good reason for graduating later.

The issues of workload and loans are going to be specific to your situation. At the school I went to, 4 "real" classes per quarter plus summer classes would be enough to drive someone insane. At others it might be survivable. If your school is fairly cheap, another year in loans may not be a big problem; if it is horribly expensive, that's quite different. If you feel that you can reasonably handle the financial burden either way, my suggestion is to take money completely out of the equation.

My personal opinion would be that your odds of graduating on schedule are probably lower with the shorter plan, simply because (based on what I went through) it would be fairly grueling. You would be more likely to drop/fail a class and have to retake it, or just get burned out and have to slow down.

 

[oiprocs]

Hmm, not sure about the typical finish time. It's UCSD, so I figure 4.5-5? No clue really.

Yes, I did slack off for 3 years, but I had switched around majors many many times, I think 14 in all. I was expecting to find the "perfect" major, and it wasn't until this past summer (after yet another quarter of 'great, I don't wanna study that anymore) before I realized that there was no such thing, and I was using a lack of interest as a means to switch out. Simply stated, when things got tough, I quit like a pansy. Not too proud of that, but I decided that out of all the fields I studied, engineering interested me the most. It helped that I had maintained a science/math curriculum for those 3 years.

I took 2 engineering classes in summer school and got an A/A- in them, far exceeding my the grades I had gotten thus far. In HS it was straight A's, but I became lazy and thought school would be just as easy in college.

Now that I know I can do well academically, I'm left to decide if I want to get out in 2 more years or 3. If I maintain these high grades for the next 3 years, an upward trend could be nice thing to show to employers. "Yeah I did shitty at first, but once I got focused I started churning out A's like butter." Plus, as you said, that's a lot more time to get internships/work experience to be coupled along with that upward trend, which would grant me better positioning in getting that first job.