Advice on transferring?

al6200
Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:20:29 +0000

Stanford and MIT are a lot harder for transfer admissions than they are for freshman admissions, so they may not be great choices. CMU and Berkeley probably realistic if your GPA is good. If you are looking for other schools that might be more challenging, consider Duke, Penn, CalTech, Columbia, Cornell, and JHU. All have non-trivial (>5%) transfer acceptance rates.

How far have you gotten in terms of courses at UIUC? In my experience there is a BIG difference between the 100-200 level intro courses, which are pretty easy at most schools and the 400-600 level courses. If transferring doesn’t work out you might find that graduate level courses give the challenge you’re looking for.