College List for Transfer

Applying to College
1

I am currently 23 years old and have 24 credits. After spring 2017 when I turn 24, I will be transferring out of my Mass Community College into a 4 year school and was looking for suggestions as to which colleges I should apply to.

My current stats are as followed:

High-school: 2.7 (2011, I never did my school work)

College GPA: 3.9 Honors scholar (4 Ws from 2012-2013 after I dropped out of school which I later retook and got As in.)
My course schedule for the summer is 2 classes full time which I have As in so far, while I am working with 6 classes in the Fall along with some research activity at a local bank.

ACT: 35 (36,33,36,36) (2016) 1 attempt, may try for 36 in math to raise super score.

New SAT: 1570 (2016)

SAT 2s: 780 LIT (2016), 800 MA2 (2016) with two more (AH,WH) I plan to take in December.

LSAT: 176 (reason I took was to overshadow my high-school grades and withdrawals from early college however I don’t know how I would go about submitting this score to an undergraduate school maybe through supplementary materials.)

GRE: I plan to take during the Fall.

I have several extracurricular activities from high-school but I’m not sure they will matter in 2017. Of my extracurricular activities, there were several leadership positions including mock Banking with some mock stock exchange activities, topping it off with a 3rd place finish in a history quiz at the state level.

When I dropped out of college in 2013, I was homeless for a time being so I guess that is something to write about in an essay. My ethnicity was never something that mattered to me but I am Lebanese (I was born in the states however) if that counts for anything. I can also speak and write Arabic.

Preferably I would like to go to a college in the northeast to better care for my father but I am open to any location on the east coast. Thank you for your time and good-luck to the rest of you applying to colleges.

2

Much of what you are doing is overkill. No one is going to look at your LSAT or GRE scores for undergraduate transfer admissions. You will also have accrued enough credits by the time you transfer that your high school performance will be irrelevant as well. What matters most is your undergraduate transcript, which should be stellar if you continue your 3.9 GPA performance thus far.

Given your admirable CC performance so far, make sure you do all of the following:

  • Find out if your CC has a Phi Theta Kappa chapter, and what it takes to get into it. Many schools have scholarships for transferring PTK students.
  • Read up on the MassTransfer program. You could potentially earn 2 years of free tuition at a public Mass university if you finish your AA at the community college with your GPA. Along with guaranteed admission, guaranteed credit transfer, and no essay required.
  • Talk to the counseling department at your CC about your transfer options. They may know about all sorts of additional programs I haven't mentioned here.
3

Cornell takes transfers from CCs. You would need to know what you want to study there. You’d apply stating that you want to be in X program at Cornell CALS, if indeed that’s where you want to be.

IMO regardless of the school basically you would want to look into first what you can afford and then what you want to study. That will help you narrow your choices. Most schools take transfer students.

The supermatch feature on this site may help you narrow your choices.

It never hurts to include your LSAT score with your application. Your LSAT is stellar and you may want to see if there are joint law-school and undergrad programs. Barnard has one, but I sense that you identify as male, not female. You may want to look for other universities with joint undergrad and Law programs.

Okay, I just googled it. As it turns out, it’s not just Barnard with the joint JD degree, but Columbia. You may want to consider (if you can afford it) the Columbia GS program with joint degree law school. You’d need to contact each school’s admissions department separately to see if the GS program and the Law School work together in this way. I should think that the homeless-to-harvard narrative that you have, potentially, may work for getting aid from GS, but that’s entirely speculation. Aid would more likely be a matter of what’s available and what you need. It looks like Penn also has one, but it’s unclear if Penn LPS is included in that program–Pen LPS is the school (Like GS) for adult students. I’ve heard (with no way to verify) that aid at GS and LPS is sometimes spotty.

One word of caution about law degrees, cost of law school can be quite high, even at low-tier schools. Universities that are struggling have used their law schools as tuition generators. (Google: An Expensive Law Degree and No place to use it, NYTimes) Schools below the very highest tier have pretty lousy employment records, meaning that you may not actually work in the field of law and you may have lots of debt. That doesn’t mean that there are no jobs in law. There are, and there are good jobs in law, but as with many fields, getting those jobs is extremely competitive. Law used to be considered a sort of safety career, but no more. Your LSAT is extremely competitive, IMO. The ABA lists the employment records of various law schools. Top tier law schools can also provide debt forgiveness if you decide to go into public interest law, which tends to not pay as well as the private sector at least at first. Public sector law jobs can lead to all kinds of things, very well paying, high prestige, the whole shebang, just as corporate law jobs can lead to great things. The career is what you make of it, but make sure that you’re getting a good start by choosing your law school wisely. They are not all the same!

Here is a list of other accelerated JD programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_JD_program

4

Just googled how long LSAT scores last. 5 years it looks like. You may be able to slip right into law school, and a really good one at that, with a 176. Like that’s (I’m guestimating) a Top 5 law school level, if you keep your grades up. For law school, you can pretty much major in anything as an undergrad. That being said, if law looks like a direction you’d like to choose, you may want to do an internship in your area of interest with law in the back of your mind. Engineers go to law school; nurses go; artists go and do arts-related law; theater majors; language and area-studies major go; Native American-interested people attend law school; advocacy-oriented people, such as for issues of gender, environment, global warming, immigration, homelessness, you name it.

As you move forward, you may want to think about law and your area of interest and see if they combine well. Top law schools will embrace whatever your area of interest.