How to Manage an In-Person Engineering Degree Plus Two Online Bachelor’s: Practical Tips From a College Counselor
Last Sunday, I was folding mismatched soccer socks at my kitchen counter when my 20-year-old nephew Luka slid a printed degree plan across my dining table, crumbs of arepa sticking to the edge. His mom, my sister, was leaning against the fridge with her arms crossed, already shaking her head. “Tell him this is crazy,” she said. Luka’s already in a full-time in-person mechanical engineering program, and he’s already got one online bachelor’s in business administration. Now he wants to add a second online bachelor’s in data science. I’ve been a high school college counselor for 18 years, so I get the panic: how does anyone pull off an in-person engineering load, let alone two extra online degrees on top of it? But I’ve also seen a handful of ambitious kids make this work, and after sitting with Luka for an hour and walking through what’s actually working for him, the takeaways are a lot more concrete than generic “stay organized” advice.
My sister’s worry wasn’t unfounded. Luka’s first semester, he almost failed thermodynamics because he prioritized his online business assignments over in-person class homework, and ended up cramming for midterms in three different subjects at once. He pulled a D, and had to retake the class over summer break. That’s when he started building the small routines that keep him on track now.
The first change he made was blocking non-negotiable time before anything else, instead of fitting school into leftover space. Every Sunday night, he pulls up his digital calendar and first blocks all his in-person classes and labs, then adds 2 hours of homework time for each engineering class right after that—no exceptions, no moving those blocks for other plans. Next, he adds 90 minutes a day for each online degree, split between 45 minutes before his first in-person class and 45 minutes after lab ends. The last thing he blocks is 3 full hours of unstructured, no-homework time every Saturday morning, that he won’t give up for any deadline. If a group project for engineering takes extra time one week, he cuts time from scrolling TikTok or casual hanging out, not from his required degree blocks. He also uses a simple trick to beat post-lab fatigue: he starts with 10 minutes of an online lecture as soon as he gets home, before he checks his phone. Most of the time, once he’s started, he keeps going instead of getting sucked into an hour of mindless scrolling.
Next, he actively aligns overlapping content to cut down on extra work. Luka figured out early that most of his core classes overlap across all three degrees. Engineering requires upper-level statistics, and his online data science degree also requires the same level stats class. When cross-credit transfer wasn’t allowed, he used the same notes for both courses, and adapted a predictive maintenance capstone project for his engineering lab into his data science final project. That cut out almost 15 hours of extra work that semester. He also only picks online electives that tie directly to his long-term goal of working in industrial robotics, so he never wastes time on classes that don’t add value to his main degree or his career plans.
He’s also ruthless about cutting low-stakes commitments, and doesn’t pressure himself to finish all three degrees on an arbitrary timeline. Luka didn’t cut out all fun—he still goes to concerts with his girlfriend once a month, and hikes every other weekend. But he dropped the weekly Friday game night he’d gone to with high school friends after realizing he only attended out of habit, and it took 4 hours every week that he could have used to get ahead on assignments. Most importantly, he doesn’t try to cram a full load of engineering plus two full online loads every single semester. If an engineering semester has two tough lab classes, he drops one online class before the add/drop deadline. That means his two online degrees will take an extra semester to finish instead of graduating all three at once, but it means he avoids failing classes or burning out completely.
The last small habit that makes a big difference is being upfront with all professors and advisors from day one. Luka emails every professor and his two online program advisors on the first day of the semester, tells them he’s completing three degrees total, and says he’ll give at least a week’s heads up if he needs an extra day or two on a deadline. He told me almost all of them have been fine with that, because he’s not asking for last-minute favors when he should have planned ahead. One of his engineering professors even connected him to a research project that counts for credit in both engineering and data science, because he knew Luka was looking for overlapping work.
I still tell families this isn’t for everyone. There’s no shame in taking one degree at a time, and most people would burn out in two months trying this schedule. My sister still worries sometimes—she points out Luka hasn’t had a full week off from school in over a year, and that can’t be sustainable long-term. Luka says it’s worth it to him: the internship he got last month was at a top robotics firm, and the hiring manager specifically said his combination of in-person engineering training and two online degrees is exactly what they were looking for, a skill set most candidates don’t have.
We were at a family cookout last weekend, and Luka spent half an hour showing me the 3D-printed robot prototype he’s building for his senior design class, talking about how his business degree is already helping him write the business plan for the startup he wants to launch after graduation. He still has 18 months left to go, and there’s no guarantee he won’t hit a point where he decides one online degree is enough. That outcome would be fine too. So far, the small, specific choices he’s made have kept him on track. It’s not a perfect system, and it’s not for everyone, but it’s working for him, right now.
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