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The University of New Mexico

BS/MS Shared Credit Degree Program

The School of Engineering offers a Shared Credit Degrees Program designed to allow students to complete a BS and MS degree in five years (depending upon the student’s mathematics preparation upon entering UNM as a first-year student). To accomplish this, some courses are counted towards both the Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees.

Curriculum

School of Engineering courses that can be shared between BS and MS degrees fall into two categories:

  1. Courses that are designated as either technical electives, track electives, engineering electives, management electives, or advanced science electives. In the shared-credit degrees program, these courses are replaced by appropriate 500-level graduate courses that count towards both degrees, and;
  2. Courses that are offered at both the 400 (undergraduate) and 500 (graduate) levels. Students in the shared-credit degrees program will take these courses at the 500-level with the course counting towards both the BS and MS degrees.

This program is intended to facilitate both disciplinary and interdisciplinary BS and MS degree programs. The exact curriculum for each student is determined with consultation from the director of undergraduate studies for the student’s BS degree and the director of graduate studies for the student’s MS degree, and is approved by the School of Engineering Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

Students pursuing an interdisciplinary shared-credit degrees program may be required to take prerequisite courses for the graduate level courses in the MS program. Thus, an interdisciplinary shared-credit degrees program may require more than the nominal five years to complete. Therefore, although it is possible to transition from any undergraduate program within the School of Engineering to the Biomedical Engineering graduate program, some paths may be simpler than others. One of the most direct pathways into the BME graduate program is from the Bioengineering concentration of the Chemical Engineering undergraduate program.

Admission

The B.S./MS Shared-Credit Degrees Program is a special program for which a student applies during the junior year of the BS program. Students may apply after completing 75 credit hours applicable to the BS degree. In order to be eligible for the shared-credit Degrees Program, students must have already been admitted to a BS degree program in the School.

Students applying for the program must complete the following:

Admission to the graduate portion of this program is provisional, and is not finalized until the student satisfactorily completes the requirements for the BS degree.