Based on what you have said about your GPA up to this point, I am pretty sure that for a bachelor’s degree these just are not going to happen. The same is true of Columbia. Your grades are just not strong enough to transfer to a university that is this selective.
There are however thousands of colleges and universities in the US. If you want to transfer to get a bachelor’s degree from a university in the US, you will need to aim for schools that are not quite so highly ranked. Something like the University of Massachusetts in Lowell might be possible. The University of Massachusetts in Amherst would be less likely, but still might (? or might not?) be possible. The University of New Hampshire might be possible, or the University of Maine. There are perhaps at least 100 other universities that might be worth considering. None of them are ranked in the top 20 in the US, and “top 50” might be unlikely. This still leaves a lot of universities.
This sounds about right to me also.
Once you get your bachelor’s degree, if you are then applying to graduate programs, your high school GPA will not matter anymore. For graduate admissions they will not care and will not ask what you did in high school. They will care about anything that you ever did in university (although courses related to your major and more recent courses might matter more).
If you return to university in Korea, or anywhere else, you should make a very strong effort to do very well. Doing very well where you are will make it more likely to be able to transfer at some point in the future to a different and possibly higher ranked university.
By the way, there are some very smart people associated with the US military. I have worked with some of them. As one example, there are various types of studies and analysis that the military does. Some of this involves advanced mathematics. The US military is a very large organization and keeping all of this running smoothly requires a lot of coordination and somewhere a lot of smarts.
@Lagin to get a student visa to study in the United States, you will need to complete a certificate of finances. This needs to document that you have sufficient funds to pay for your entire college education here…at the ready. This can include awarded college financial aid, and approved loans. It cannot include possible future earnings or any other not already secured funds.
So…if you get accepted at a $90,000 a year college and need four years there, you will have to document that you have $360,000 at the ready to fund your studies here…or you will not get a student visa.
So if you don’t know what you want to study, why would you waste an incredible amount of money to play “American College experience” without a goal?
Yes, there are American students who don’t know what they want to study, but they reside here and typically wont be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure that out.
It sounds like your goal is to live in the US because you don’t like your country. That’s not a good enough reason to be admitted for a visa.
I would suggest that you continue with your education in your country, figure out what you want to study, and develop some maturity and manners:
Most Americans have relatives and friends in the Military. You may not have met too many “book-smart” personnel because many haven’t had the chance to “study” the sciences and classics, but they are some of the smartest people I have ever met and encountered.
My Army father could take apart a truck engine, know every part, and its purpose, and predict how the engine could perform based on various conditions. Being a rural kid, he knew how to plant, harvest, milk/care for livestock, build rooms, plumb pipes, rotate crops and read aversive weather affecting/impacting their ranch and our home.
I guess in your time with Army personnel, you didn’t learn how to carry on conversations without seeming to belittle your speaking partners.
An important social skill needed in the US is being a friend, and not being a snob/judgmental because until you learn that skill, you will be a very, very lonely student, no matter where you are.
Your application will necessarily look different from others’ because of your military service. Hopefully, you did quite a few things during that time, perhaps got recognized in some way: this will go onto your Transfer CommonApp.
A college that’s used to students attending after military service is Brandeis, because they have a scholarship for Israeli students (all of whom have had to do military service). It’s a reach for you but hopefully your military service + 3.8 college GPA will carry weight.
In HS, did you attend a Korean HS or an international HS (if international, what curriculum did you follow - such as IB, IGCSE/ALevels, etc)?