LUMS offers various courses from many different fields that students can study. Thus, it provides a very holistic educational experience for its students.
Your courses will be divided approximately evenly across the time duration of the 4 years of study you’ll have to go through at LUMS (5 years if you’re doing a Law degree).
It is also useful to look at the various schools in LUMS: There are a total of 4 schools providing undergraduate degrees. The schools are SDSB (Business school), MGSHSS (social-science and humanities school), SBASSE (engineering and natural sciences school), and SAHSOL (Law school). Each school offers courses related to its domain.
When you secure admission to LUMS, you will be enrolled in one of the schools mentioned earlier (according to your major selection at the time of university application). Of course, you’ll be allowed to take courses offered by your own school, but you can also try enrolling in courses outside of your school.
Your major will be officially undeclared until the end of your first year at LUMS(except if you are anMGSHSS student, in which case it’ll remain undeclared till the end of your second year). The rationale for this is for students to not feel confined by the major they chose during the time of their admission and be able to explore other courses from their school before finally settling for a major.
Some courses, called core courses, are mandatory for you to study at LUMS. There are two types: university core courses (incl. Islamic Studies, Pakistan Studies, Writing & Communication) and school core courses. Every student in LUMS will need to study university cores. The school cores vary according to the different schools. For example, some of the core courses of SBASSE are Modern Physics and Biology Lab, but an MGSHSS student won’t need to study them. University and School cores can be highly irrelevant to your actual major.
There are degree cores too. These are courses you must take to complete your degree requirements and they are relevant to the major chosen by
You will also be required to take out-group and free elective courses.
Out-group courses are courses that are mostly irrelevant to your major. You just take them to explore and expand your understanding of different disciplines. For example, an SDSB student can have LAW and certain HSS courses as their out-group courses.
Free elective courses provide you the cushion to take any courses you please from or outside your school as per your interests.
All courses related to the same discipline are categorized according to the difficulty into 4 levels—these range from 100, 200, 300 to 400-levels, with the easiest being 100-level courses.
If you are unhappy with your major, you can transfer from one department to the other within the same school. The process is called an inter-school transfer.
If you want to change your school completely, you can opt for an inter-school transfer. However, there are often minimum GPA and course requirements you must fulfill to be able to do this.
