Don't understand the 2nd guessing.

cobrat
Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:45:43 +0000

emeraldkity4:

I agree & as I mentioned in my original post I understand that there are some very good reasons to change schools. But what confuses me is the motivation behind intending to transfer when the school year has barely begun or even when you have barely sent in your letter of acceptance.

How much effort are you going to put into where you are, if you are always thinking about where you wish you were?



Maybe those kids were unable to get into a higher academic tier of schools that would match their capabilities than their state/city flagships(sometimes even with honors programs) because they attended a highly rigorous public magnet high school where the rigor/grading was such that their GPAs were in the toilet.

That was the situation with several high school classmates who were C/D average students at my high school in the early-mid '90s and yet…were hamstrung by their state/city university bureaucracies from taking more advanced courses. As a result, they were bored to tears in the mandated intro/intermediate classes that were so dumbed down that they managed A/A+ without opening their textbooks while the vast majority of their classmates struggled to pass or even flunked. They all felt the lack of academic rigor was such that they were wasting their time if they stayed there. One of them even likened it to going from rigorous high school to being dropped back to lackluster junior high.

It was only after they ended up transferring up to elite LACs/universities like Reed, CMU, Brown, Columbia, etc that they finally felt they were with a critical mass of students who matched their academic capabilities. All ended up being far happier…and still managed to graduate with 3.5+ GPAs at their new institutions despite being mostly STEM majors.