I graduated high school in the bay area, and went straight to Oregon State as an electrical engineering major. I’m now in my sophomore year, and while I like EE and plan to stick with it, I’m starting to second guess my choice of university and am wondering if transferring to UC Davis is a crazy idea.
A few reasons: It’s hard to pin it down, but I like UCD better in some ways. Maybe it’s the campus/area - I’m not real crazy about Corvallis, and now that I have a car, I find there’s not much of interest in the nearby towns either. Maybe it’s the weather here (which does get a bit gloomy in the winter). Or just that they have some better programs there (music, for one), or the lack of support from the college of engineering for certain projects - I’m on a vehicle engineering team that kicked out of COE, no reasoning why or support from them, and everyone from us to the group that represents the student body is baffled. And yes, I know not to be negative toward my existing university with transfers (on essays anyway), but that is a reason. Also - from what older students have told me, some of the engineering classes (the labs in particular) are poorly laid out. Though I hope I wouldn’t be trading one set of problems for another.
Both campuses have a relatively similar feel (fairly flat and spread out, though they have even more bikes), and I’ve spent a fair deal of time around Davis (parents went there, and we’ve gone up many times just for kicks or picnic day). I have no doubt that I’d fit right in with the campus, and I do like the feel of it and surrounding area more. Another reason is this would put me much closer to home, and I do wish I could easily drive home for weekends when I like (which many of my friends do). My parents went there as well - an hour drive vs a 9 hour drive/a state away. And I do like the graduate/professor research going on over there - clean energy programs, and I recall seeing modded plugin Prius projects there by professors/researchers several years ago (before that was a commercial thing). Over here, not as much. (And frankly, I wonder if we get more idiots here - higher acceptance rate, big chunk of Oregon students go here. Hard to say.) I suspect that it’s easier to get into grad school if you already know a professor and have worked with them. One issue though is transferring would probably throw me off course (I’m currently on track for 4 years, who knows if that’ll last anyway in engineering), and make the summer a bit odd in terms of internships and club projects. (i.e. I’m on a vehicle club at OSU, but if I transferred, I’d join something similar there. And we do work on this during the summer.) I did apply to Davis in HS, among a bunch of others, but didn’t quite have the grades to get in (although as a transfer, it looks like a realistic possibility). For that matter, I know a guy who dropped out of OSU after a year (who never was quite happy here) and moved to another state for community college, no doubt planning to transfer to the university there that he’s been eyeing. Also a guy who went to Cal Poly Pomona, and transferred to OSU after a year or so. My dad did casually mention that I could probably transfer there (particularly at the 2 year mark) if I so desired, though at the time I blew it off. I’m thinking back to that now though.
Am I being stupid and shortsighted here, or is this a realistic, potentially good idea? This is just an idea at the moment - I haven’t done anything yet.