Advice on transferring?

alecbenzer
Sun, 09 Oct 2011 17:43:34 +0000

I’m a freshmen at uiuc right now, studying cs. I’d known for a pretty long time that I’d wanted to study cs in college (I went to a local magnet school that had a cs concentration, which was the reason I wanted to go there, so I apparently had a pretty good idea I wanted to study cs even before I was in high school). Going along those lines, my college search process basically consisted of finding out what schools had strong cs departments. A bit of searching led to the big four that always seemed to be mentioned (MIT, CMU, Berkeley, Stanford). I’m from the east coast, and my parents were wary of letting me go to California for college, so I focused on MIT and CMU. While I was visiting CMU we asked one of the people in cs department about some other schools that might be good for cs, and he mentioned uiuc. So I applied there, too (I’d also stumbled upon some other seemingly cool stuff from there like llvm and a tutorial on writing an os that their sigops was writing). In hindsight my college search probably should have been more involved, but for various reasons (one of them being that I was depressed from time to time) it wasn’t.

I ended up getting rejected from MIT and waitlisted at CMU SCS, but I got into uiuc so I ended up going there. Now that I’m here, though (well, and even before I got here, really) I’m not sure I really want to be here. The most obvious thing I seem to not like is how local the school feels. Almost everyone seems to be from Illinois, and while I knew about this ahead of time, just being around it all the time makes it feel different. It also makes it difficult to believe I’m around smart people (not that people from Illinois are stupid, but unless people from Illinois are very far ahead people from other states in terms of intelligence, taking people from multiple states would have better results in terms of average intelligence).

A big part of what I thought would make college worth it for me was being around other smart people that would hopefully push me to better myself and being presented with challenging courses that I’d be able to go through with people around me. I’m in a sophomore level cs class as a freshmen and I don’t know that I’m really getting much out of it (in that I know most of the material that’s been covered so far, and what I don’t know could’ve probably been fixed with some quick googling). I’m in a physics class where we’re covering stuff we did in my junior physics class in high school. The closest thing to a class where I feel like I’m being pretty adequately challenged is the 400 level honors math class I’m in, and even then I feel like I’m smarter than some of the people in the class (not that I’m leaps and bounds ahead of them or anything, but I would have thought that I’d be among relatively significantly smarter people in a 400 level honors course, and I seem to be about on par with the other people, on average).

I just sort of don’t feel like I really belong here a lot of the time. I sort of feel out of place and like things are kind of backwards - I went to a high school were everyone was a nerd and people were really intelligent, and in some ways my experience here so far feels more like what a typical high school experience would have been like. It’s not like it’s completely devoid of smart people and nerds here (I’m pretty sure, for example, that Rutgers, my state school, would’ve been slightly worse in this regard), but it still feels like it’s not exactly what I would’ve hoped for. I’ve met a few people that seem intelligent to the extent where I’d be pushed to grow and learn from them, but I feel like that effect only happens when you’re around many many people like that, not just a few.

So, because of all of that, I’m considering transferring. Things stopping me:

1) While there’s a lot I’m not thrilled about, the school does have a good cs reputation, and it seems like this might be a plus in terms of recruitment. In the first 1-2 months we’ve already had a bunch of job fairs with pretty big companies showing up.

2) Going along with 1), I’m not sure where I’d transfer to. I want an improvement but a strong cs department is still important to me. Looking at rankings for cs depts, there are basically other state schools (and I don’t think it would be worth it to transfer to a different state school, except maybe Berkeley), and elite private schools like MIT, Stanford, Caltech, which, as far as I know, all have very low transfer acceptance rates (I’d imagine CMU in general does not but I think SCS does, especially for external transfers). So basically, I don’t know where I’d transfer to. I’d either need to apply to those schools and have little chance of getting in, or give up the strength/reputation of the cs department a bit and go for somewhere I’d have a better chance for. And in that case I really have no idea what kind of places I’d go for.

3) I’m tired. I’m really sort of dreading having to go through the app process again (and potentially get rejected from a bunch of places again).

4) Recs. I have like 4 teachers this semester, and one of them definitely has zero clue who I am. I actually have decent relationships with the other 3, to the extent where it would not be completely ridiculous for me to ask for a rec, but I still really don’t know if any of them would be good fits for a rec or if they’d be willing to write them.

I think that’s about it. I’m looking for advice. Should I stay? Should I transfer? If so, where to? If I haven’t given enough info for useful advice, feel free to ask anything. Thanks. :)