<p>First, my two cents. Bates is a wonderful college, and I don’t understand why you don’t stay put. It’s one of the top 25 LACs in the country. You haven’t even gotten to Bates yet, so it seems a little premature to attempt to transfer already. You may fall in complete love with it and decide you don’t want to leave. The Ivy League is just an athletic conference, so it seems silly to get attached to a small subset of schools in the country when you got into a college of similar caliber. By the way, Stanford is not an Ivy.</p>
<p>Keep in mind, also, that transfer admissions to Ivies is extremely competitive. Yale, for example, says that they receive over 1,000 applications each year but only admits 20-30 transfer students. That’s a 0.02-0.03% rate of acceptance. All the Ivies likely have similar rates. They have high retention rates and very little reason to admit transfer students (probably the reason Princeton doesn’t). All the transfer websites I visited in the Ivy League says that they look for students who have compelling reasons for wanting to transfer into their school. “Always wanting to have attended one” doesn’t seem like a particularly compelling reason.</p>
<p>As a residence hall director I knew several transfer students into my Ivy, though (about 20ish total, including one of my RAs). Most of them transferred after their sophomore year, although my RA transferred after his junior year. He transferred from another Ivy (Dartmouth), and he did have a compelling reason (he didn’t fit into Dartmouth socially or academically for a variety of reasons, and thought that Columbia’s atmosphere would be a better fit for him for X reasons).</p>
<p>To answer your questions:</p>
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<li><p>This depends, especially on how “bad” your undergrad record was. I highly doubt that it was sub-par, as you got into one of the top 25 LACs in the nation. Honestly, it really depends on what you are able to accomplish in your first few months as a Bates student. If you are already bent on transferring, I would not wait. Go ahead and apply your freshman year; you give yourself a chance to try again in case you are unsuccessful.</p></li>
<li><p>The answer for this is self-evident: Everything. You will have to be even MORE competitive as a transfer student than you were as a high school student. Don’t focus on any one thing; focus on all things. Your GPA should be top notch (at least a 3.5, I would say, but you’ll really want to aim for a 3.7+ in your first and second year) and you should get very involved at Bates. You need to demonstrate to them that you will be an asset to their campus, should you transfer. So get involved in things you love (you should do this anyway!). I think it would be rather silly to retake the SATs, especially as they diminish in importance after you have a good college record behind you, but if your scores are really on the low end for these schools it might be worth it.</p></li>
<li><p>I looked on Stanford, Penn, and Harvard’s websites and wasn’t able to find any concrete information about whether they met need for transfer students. My guess is that Harvard does, but I’m not sure about Penn and Stanford. If they meet need, they can meet it in a variety of ways. Most likely, a Stafford loan will be included, and probably also work-study and a student contribution. However, it depends on your family’s circumstances. (Again, knowing that you got nearly a full ride from Bates - and I think I remember seeing your aid package in another thread, and it was incredible - I wonder WHY you would want to transfer from one of the TOP 25 LACs in the whole damn country just for the sake of saying you went to an Ivy.)</p></li>
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