Advice on transferring?

alecbenzer
Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:54:03 +0000

CalTech, Cornell, and Columbia were other schools on my mind (although I was also rejected from Cornell and Columbia last year). I actually recently noticed that CalTech’s admit rate was pretty high for transfers (it looked like 10% for people from 4 year colleges), and it also looked like they didn’t ask for recommendations, which helps for that issue. They also don’t look at SATs, which I think was a weaker point in my apps last year (2270 super score, though that’s with a 690 in reading, and I had a 680 in chem sat II). And there’s also the plus of not having already been rejected. One downside I can think of is that something I think might help my apps this year over last is that I’ve had/have two internships since I applied (at Morgan Stanley’s tech dept during the summer and now at Wolfram Research), whereas before my only job experience was at a summer camp my school runs. I feel like CalTech would care much less about that than other schools might.

I don’t know much about Duke or JHU, though somehow I feel like they wouldn’t be good fits, though if you have a reason to think they may be I’m open to suggestions. All I know about Penn is that my dad transferred there for his undergrad and ended up being pretty unhappy with it, and I’d probably group it with Duke and JHU in terms of fit. But again, I hadn’t done much research into them.

At uiuc I’m currently taking CS 225 (data structures), PHYS 211 (mechanics), MATH 416 (honors abstract linear algebra), and RHET 105 (basic writing course freshmen with <700 in SAT CR, or whatever the ACT equivalent is, need to take). I feel like MATH 416 is pretty adequately challenging, especially in light of the fact that it’s my second time being exposed to the material. Though that’s really only for the honors section - I was in the non-honors section of the class for the first 2 weeks, and it was much less in line with what I feel like I’d want out of a college level math course. But so I suppose if I continue taking advanced honors level math course I’d be happy.

CS 225 is pretty easy, and I got to it by skipping over 2 other classes, though like you said, this might just be the case for intro level courses. Although, when visiting uiuc, I did sit in on a 400 level cs algorithms course, and I was actually already learning a good amount of the stuff in my high school data structures course at the time (not sure how telling that is though - I have some friends from my high school at MIT, and they say that some of what we do in that hs class is junior/senior level material even at MIT).

More than just the course difficulty though, the intelligence and attitude of the other students gets to me more sometimes. If the school were filled with more people like those in my math class I’d probably be a significantly happier. There definitely seem to be cool people here that I might be missing out on (I should probably check out the ACM office and some of the gaming clubs more, for example), and so I’m sure I’ll find a way to not be miserable here if I end up having to stay. It’s just that “not miserable” or even “relatively happy” don’t seem like great goals, especially when a) other people seem to fit in at their colleges so well, and b) I’m paying a pretty significant amount of money to be here.

Thanks for replying.

edit: oh, and on Berkeley, I think they want 60 credits to transfer, so that doesn’t look like an option for this year anyway. I’ve heard CMU SCS is really tough to transfer into because there’s already a lot of competition from people in other colleges at CMU who want to get into SCS. If I do end up transferring I’ll probably be throwing an app their anyway, though.