School of Engineering and Computer Science
Blended Masters Degree Program
The accelerated Blended Masters Degree Program provides an excellent opportunity for students to begin their graduate work while completing their undergraduate degree reuirements. This curriculum allows students to complete their Bachelors and Masters degrees in a total of five years. (This may include some summer sessions, depending upon if advanced placement units were earned prior to starting at Pacific.) Students would apply for the graduate program two years prior to their anticipated graduation date.
Priority admission consideration: School of Engineering and Computer Science undergraduates maintaining a minimum institutional GPA of 3.0 upon reaching senior status are given priority admission consideration* to the Blended Program and may begin taking graduate level courses at that time, allowing the BS and MS degrees to blend together.
Financial Aid Benefit: The engineering curricula at Pacific are recognized by most financial aid benefactors (including the State of California with the CalGrant) as five-year programs. Many students are able to complete the programs in three or four years with Advanced Placement credits, taking advantage of summer school, and/or by taking slightly larger loads than normal each semester. Students in this program can elect to blend their undergraduate and graduate courses together the final two years, taking both the undergraduate and the graduate degrees on the exact same date. In this circumstance, it is possible for students' financial aid to continue through both degrees.
Co-op Advantage: Students in this plan who choose the non-thesis option can postpone their co-op experience until their penultimate semester, presumably having all or nearly all their undergraduate coursework and some graduate coursework completed by this time. This will qualify them for a higher technical experience for their co-op. They can then register for the graduate level "Directed Experiential Learning" placement, which is the same as a co-op placement, except that a higher level engineering or computer science experience is expected, and students must submit a culminating report which documents fulfillment of specified technical and professional learning objectives. This experience concurrently satisfies the co-op requirement for the undergraduate degree.
Backing Out: Students who choose to withdraw from the Blended Program prior to completing all the requirements may be awarded the Bachelor of Science degree alone, contingent upon having completed all of those respective program requirements, including the equivalent co-op experience.
*Students must still submit a complete Application for University Admission and required documents during the open application filing period. Barring any unforeseen extreme concerns in the student's application file, Pacific will guarantee admission into the above MSES Blended program.
