I Promised Myself I Wouldn't Do Another Chance Me...BUT

Transfer Students
1

So I promised myself that after high school I would stay off of this site… but here we are.

Basically, I am an incoming sophomore at UCLA and at the moment I’m really not content with a lot of elements of the school. I am a Political Science major and UCLA is super geared towards pre-med and I find opportunities to partake in activities such as political research, political journalism etc. very limited on campus. When I look off-campus, there are no internships I can pursue that focus on international policy, and very few think tank type institutions that I can apply for internships with. I am/will be an intern at different political offices, but an intern at your congressman’s district office is as far up as there is to go. That in and of itself would be alright, but to top it off the school is so big and the impersonality of it really makes you feel like just a number, no matter how hard you try to get involved. I don’t think that learning about American Politics works well in a 400 person classroom and 50 minute discussions led by bitter TA’s every week. Also, UCLA does not offer an International Relations degree so I am currently doing Poly Sci and an area studies in a particular country double major.

To get it out of the way, briefly my stats and ECS are:
HS GPA: 3.9/4.4
SAT: 2300, 800 World/ 780 US/ 730 Lit Subject Tests
I don’t think high school EC’s are super relevant

College GPA: 4.0 (have some A+'s scattered in if that helps) after first year, Honors College
EC’s: two Congressional internships, three separate research experiences, founded and running a political education startup, invited to 2 political conferences, won research awards, and hopefully published in a journal.

The schools I want to transfer to are:

Columbia: New York is great for internships and they have a lot of huge programs that are custom tailored to particulars of my major)
Georgetown: SFS!!! (Internships Internships Internships)
Yale: (all of its programs for poly sci and my area studies are top top notch+ residential colleges)
Dartmouth: I just love how small the school is while retaining all the resources of a large university. The D-plan is super perfect for internships and tailoring my education experience to my ambitions
Pomona College: well definitely the size is huge, and it was my dream dream school coming out of high school. I know the internship opportunities still aren’t there but I truly love everything about this school and think it’ll provide the best education opportunities
Stanford: Stanford, enough said I mean the reasons here are basically the same as the other ones.

I feel as though at public schools it’s so easy to lose that intellectual spark and quest for knowledge in the midst of all the red tape and feelings of “being lost”. I want to know if I at least have a solid chance, and applying would not be a waste of time. I know I have to articulate the reasons why I want to leave my school, and go to ___ school, but are my reasons adequate? Thanks to everyone who gave advice, and if you do have any questions about UCLA (a popular school for incoming transfers on this forum), I’m happy to answer!

2

I’ll be frank with you, if you can’t find internships at UCLA, you’re not trying hard enough. Internships and research don’t involve being plopped down on your lap. It means making relationships with professors, networking at events, and making connections. If you want to transfer because you want a prestige bump, then do that if it makes you happy but I would not delude yourself into thinking that your opportunities will be any greater or lesser at a different university.

3

@Burdened I think you’ve completely missed my point to go on some rant. I’m saying that in one year at UCLA I was able to do research with three professors and win awards for my research. I was able to get 2 internships with politicians. However that’s the highest you can go here. The internships for what I want to do are concentrated in either Palo Alto (because of Stanford) or New York and DC. at UCLA there’s a huge concentration on pre-Med and STEM in general. I also think it’s really big and I don’t like that kind of learning environment. This has nothing to do with me failing to recognize opportunities.

4

If you want to try to transfer, go ahead. But you have picked all reaches, no matter what your stats are. So if you really want to leave UCLA, you should add some lower ranked schools.