Transfer chances and advise

Ravenzfan
Sun, 02 Aug 2015 11:16:16 +0000

i’m an incoming freshman and carnegie mellon’s school of computer science (and will likely double major in math as well) who is looking to transfer as a sophomore. I was waitlisted as a freshman applicant.

Basic stats: fairly wealthy asian male. 3.93 UW Gpa in HS. Essentially perfect testing with tons of APs and SAT2s. Took Lin alg and Diffy eq at a local uni, multivariable Calc dual-enrollment, a prob/star class online, and 3 coursera CS classes as well.

Main thing I had going for me was that I was pretty good at math. I qualified for USAMO senior year (top 250 in math nationwide); USAMO qualifiers have a 90% acceptance rate to at least one of HYPSM. I also did well in other prestigious math competitions, and was an alternate to RSI. The rest of my extracurriculars were fairly impressive, but nothing special for a school of yale’s caliber. The main factors that held back my application were that I was not in the top 10% of my class at a good but not extraordinary public school, and that my grades junior year were pretty bad after getting a 4.0 freshman and sophomore years. This made it seem like I had a downwards trend, but thankfully senior year I got nearly perfect grades,
With my much better results in math competitions senior year, slightly higher gpa, and reversal of my downwards trend, my application is stronger than it was a year ago, but transfer admissions is far more competitive.

I’m looking to transfer to Harvard (as well as stanford (rejected), yale (didn’t apply), USC (didn’t apply), UC Berkeley (didn’t apply), brown (didn’t apply), and Cornell (accepted)) because I have a lot more interest in humanities (especially econ, business and international/middle eastern affairs) than I did when applying to colleges last year and do not think I can stand the geeky and academically super-intense atmosphere at CMU for four more years.

I know my chances are likely slim (at least for yale harvard and Stanford), and I am also looking for advice for this process. In particular, I’m wondering how to show my interest in econ and business when I will be unable to take any econ or business classes as a freshman.