D. FEATURE – WESTERN CONCURRENT LAW AND ENGINEERING PROGRAMS
Concurrent Degree Programs for
Business and Engineering with Law
By F. Gail Manlucu
VP Marketing WPLS
On January 17th 2005, the Western Pre Law Society organized an information
session about the Concurrent Degree Programs that the University of Western
Ontario offers for joint degrees in Law & Business (at Ivey) and Law
& Engineering. At this session, two guest speakers, Adam Hoffman, a 5th
year Business and Law student and Ryan Evans, an Engineering and Law student
in his 5th year at Western, shared their experiences, answered questions and
gave their advice to students interested in pursuing these combined programs.
Hoffman and Evans gave their insights to the programs, providing both pros
and cons: "I initially found the extra academic standards of the
combination a bit draining, but Western has an amazing law school and I'm
happy that I went for it." Hoffman said about the Law & Business
program, also pointing out that "First year at Ivey can be competitive
and demanding, but once you're in Ivey, getting into law school is
easy." Evans provided similar observations, telling students that
studying both areas at once can be quite the balancing act because it can be
difficult to move back and forth between taking law classes and engineering
classes for example. However, he also said that the program is rewarding
since it opens both fields to students enabling them to meet more people,
have more variety in their courses and become more marketable when it comes
to job opportunities.
Another advantage to this program that both speakers emphasized was that by
enabling students to pursue Law and either Business or Engineering degrees
simultaneously, the concurrent programs compress the time it would take to
complete the degree of Business with Law or the degree of Engineering with
Law into only six years rather than seven. Evans found this aspect of the
program especially valuable as it results in one less year of tuition and one
extra year of income.
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In general, although both programs
have their own specific course requirements and standards of progression,
they both begin with students starting off the first two years of university
in their home faculties (courses are prescribed in Engineering but potential
Ivey students are encouraged to take a variety of courses in any faculty).
With the Engineering Concurrent program, there are four different Engineering
streams that can be combined with law: Chemical, Civil, Electrical and
Mechanical. Each stream begins with different course requirements, but all
streams enter the Law curriculum in year three. With the Law & Business
concurrent degree program at Ivey, the Law curriculum begins in fourth year
as HBA1 must be taken in year three. The remaining years in both programs are
a mixture of Law and Business or Law and Engineering courses depending on the
particular program.
If you are interested and want more information about the Law & Business
(at Ivey) or the Law & Engineering Concurrent degree programs, you can
contact Beryl Theobald, Director of Recruitment and Admissions in the Faculty
of Law at Western: theobald@uwo.ca,
Nina Lowes, Senior Academic Counsellor in the Faculty of Engineering: nlowes@eng.uwo.ca,
or you may also contact the HBA Program Office at the Ivey Business School: hba@ivey.uwo.ca.
If you do decide to apply, be sure to contact the law school and the faculty
of your interest to guarantee that you have fulfilled all the appropriate
requirements upon application.
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