Cornell First-Year Looking to Transfer

fairratings
Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:49:41 +0000

Thank you for your prompt response! It was helpful and pretty eye-opening.

But don’t you think Brown will be extra tough because I applied last year and got denied?

As far as my course load having little to do with economics, do you think it makes a difference that I’m planning on double majoring in French (regardless of having access to an IR major, I was pretty certain on pursuing a career in foreign service and/or internationally, so I was planning on mastering my fourth language)? In which case, I took a decently challenging non-introductory course counting toward my major. It’s not that I didn’t want to take another econ. course (my only other option would have been microeconomics), but I had AP credit for that so I skipped out. I am, in fact, taking intermediate microeconomics this coming semester (and another higher level course in French of course).

I do realize that greek life is everywhere, but not every school’s greek life dominates the entire social scene like Cornell’s. Here, students seem either to be in greek life or not party at all. Even the a cappella groups run on a exclusive highbrow system that resembles the greek one. There doesn’t seem to be much of a balance, which is precisely why I chose the schools that I did. Many of my friends attend these schools, and from their experience as well as the impression I got from visiting, it seems as though fraternities/sororities have at least slightly less of a presence and the social scene doesn’t completely revolve around them.
Even statistically, the percentage of the student population in greek life is much lower than that of Cornell’s.
For location, Columbia is obviously located in the city (where I used to live), and Yale is very close to where I used to go to school, and Brown just has a special place in my heart. It’s been my dream school for quite a long time. Plus, at least Rhode Island is a few hours closer to cities like Boston and New York. As much as that may not seem like a big deal, I have to fly in and out every break because I live in Argentina (I’m a domestic applicant/citizen; our family just lives abroad), and it’s such a pain that the closest city (NYC) is a 6 hour bus ride away.

I guess the most important thing for me is the lack of an international relations major (whose rigor/excellence can be affected pretty heavily by location: for a school like Columbia, there can’t possibly a better location to pursue IR than in the center of international trade and so close to the UN building). I’ve thought about this long and hard and I obviously have more than just these few reasons, but I’m not going to list every single reason on this post (I think this post might already be getting too long).

Most importantly, do you think that maybe I should apply my sophomore year then so I’ll have some time to improve my grades and take more rigorous classes related to my major? If you do think I will indeed have a better chance, would there be anything more difficult or confusing about transferring my sophomore year?

Thanks again! Your response was tremendously helpful. I wish I had known about this resource when I applied my freshmen year.