<p>At this point, I am going to attend uchicago next fall. Unfortunately, due to family issues, I don’t think I will be able to stay at chicago for more than a year. I need to try to transfer back to the east coast after my first year.</p>
<p>I scored a 2250 on the SATS (I only took them once). My score was 770 M, 740 CR, and 740 W. My high school did not calculate class rank or GPA, but I received all As and I know I was in the top 20% of my grade. I held leadership positions in extracurricular activities in high school, and I am an Indian (as in subcontinent India, not native american) male.</p>
<p>Obviously I am going to take hard classes when I arrive at chicago this fall, and I am going to work as hard as I can to get all As. I am also taking classes this summer.</p>
<p>Is there anything you can suggest I do at uchicago or this summer to improve my chances of getting into Northeast schools? </p>
<p>The schools I want to go to are Dartmouth, Brown Columbia, Yale, MIT, or Harvard. I was waitlisted at Columbia and Harvard this year (obviously I was not accepted off their waitlists), rejected by Brown and Dartmouth, and did not apply to Yale or MIT. I am pretty sure I could get into cornell, but it is still too far away. I really need to go to school in the Northeast, however, so I would appreciate all the advice you can give me in reapplying. </p>
<p>I do not have legacy or hooks at any of these schools, which to my dismay seemed like a HUGE advantage during the regular decision process. Is it near-impossible to get into these schools without legacy or hooks during the transfer process as well?</p>
<p>Get good grades. If you know that you will transfer, I wouldn’t take core classes that won’t count as credit at your new college.
I don’t have much advice, but if you get good grades at UChicago, it shows real academic strength for transfers.</p>
<p>If you need to transfer back to the East Coast for family reasons, the most important thing you can do is to stop being so picky (and prestige-driven) about the colleges you are willing to attend. There’s nothing wrong with trying to go to a top college, but if you really need to transfer you had better get some schools on your list that take more than a dozen people a year. It’s ridiculous that you don’t have Tufts, Brandeis, and Hopkins on your list, and you should be learning to love places like BU, Fordham, Rutgers, GWU, Drexel. Not to mention UMass, Vermont. Also the other women’s colleges – Smith, Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr – and other LACs like Wesleyan, Trinity, Ursinus, Vassar, Bard.</p>
<p>Also, where the heck are you talking about if “Cornell is still too far away” and Dartmouth isn’t? By “east coast” do you mean “Boston”? Cause I live on the East Coast, and Cornell is about two hours closer than Dartmouth. (Also, don’t kid yourself that you “pretty sure . . . could get into Cornell.” Even if that was true in the regular admission process, it won’t be true for a transfer.)</p>
<p>utc2011 - I’m going to echo JHS’ post - I think you should expand the range of schools you’ll be applying to soon. For a family need, it seems as if the location of the school may trump the stature of the school. You could very well apply to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, etc. to transfer, and not get into any of those schools because they take so few transfer students. </p>
<p>Out of curiosity, is there a particular reason why you selected all of those schools as transfer destinations? Aside from the geographic proximity, they strike me as some pretty different schools.</p>
<p>If geography is the absolute key factor for you, I’d definitely suggest applying to Hopkins and Penn, since they both take many more transfers than Yale or Harvard. Additionally, you should think about BU, Tufts, NYU, etc. All these schools are much more manageable in terms of transfer admissions.</p>
<p>Again, I’m curious as to why your list for the Northeast is just a tight cluster of (stature-wise, at least) very closely ranked schools. If geography is paramount, there are a TON of great schools on the east coast that feature very manageable transfer admissions.</p>
<p>How often will you need to go home? How quickly do you need to get there? Can you plan in advance? Thanks to Southwest Airlines, as long as you aren’t booking at the last minute you can travel between the University of Chicago and Providence Airport in about 4 hours for under $350 (sometimes under $250). I would be surprised if you could beat that by surface transportation from Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Hanover NH. Obviously the cost would be less, but if you are talking $1,000 /year or so it may not be a great reason to transfer.</p>
<p>Apart from usual suspects like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Brown, and the obvious additional Boston-area schools named above, and the obvious additional Amherst-area schools named above, you should be thinking about URI, UConn, Connecticut College, Wheaton College, Trinity College, Wesleyan, Bowdoin. Some of those would probably be transfer safeties for you; all of them are near-infinitely more likely to admit you than your first set.</p>
<p>Poly makes a good point above. You aren’t going to get out of taking Hum (and most colleges have a freshman writing course requirement that Hum should satisfy), but don’t take Sosc as well. And probably try to take 3-quarter sequences of standard courses, so that you’ll get a full year of credit for them.</p>
<p>First check how many transfer students they are taking. All the schools you listed are pretty hard schools to get into, and in some cases, transfer may be even more difficult. I recall that Harvard was not planning on taking any transfer students a couple of years back. Don’t know whether this is still the case.</p>
<p>Furthermore, I remember someone saying that in top schools, if they rejected you in a previous year, the odds of them accepting you next year are pretty darn low. Again, I cannot confirm this one way or the other. If you post a question on this front to the forum for those schools or forum on transfer, there will be people who have some insight on this matter who can help you strategize.</p>
<p>I agree with others here: you should cast your net much wider. The schools you listed are all crap shoots even for the regular admission, and may be more so for transfer application.</p>
<p>that said, I heard that some top schools are easier for the transfer students.</p>