How to Increase My Chances as a Transfer

Transfer Students
1

Hello. I am currently a freshman student attending public university in Houston, TX. I am a computer science major, and as of now, I feel that the degree plan at my current university won’t provide me with all the necessary skills needed to be job-ready at the time of my graduation. I really really would like to transfer to a university that is known for having a good CS program. Here are the colleges I am hoping to apply to as a transfer:

Rice University
University of Texas at Austin
University of Southern California
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Irvine
University of Washington, Seattle
Stanford University

My dream schools would be USC, Rice, UCLA, and Stanford. I wanted to ask about how I can bolster my chances as a transfer and what I need to do to give me the best chance possible of being accepted into these universities? Grades are important, no doubt, and as of right now, I am confident I can maintain a 4.0 GPA at my current university. Specifically as a CS student, what sort of extracurriculars should I do?

I’m not sure how important high school grades will be at this point, but here are some stats if they matter:

3.39 unweighted GPA
1430 SAT with a 17 essay writing score
AP scores — 4 on statistics, calculus BC, computer science A, psychology, government, macroeconomics, biology. 3 on US history, WHAP. 2 on physics 1.

My main goal here is to gain insight on what extracurriculars would best increase my chances of being accepted as a transfer, as well as any choices I should make academically to further help me. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

2

You should expect the out of state public universities to be full pay if you get accepted.

To me the main thing that you need to do is to maintain high grades in university. “A” is the goal in every class (unless they give “A+” grades). Always keep ahead in all of your homework (not easy with a CS major, unless you write code with no bugs).

The second thing is to have a realistic set of schools to apply to. UT Austin I think is a great choice to attempt to transfer to. Stanford is a very high reach – it accepts very few transfer students and your high school GPA is very low for Stanford. U.Wisconsin and U.Mass Amherst are two more schools with very strong CS that you might want to consider.