Transfer From Top LAC to Columbia/Upenn [3.85 college GPA in one semester]

Applying to College
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So:

  1. I have a 3.85 at Amherst/Williams first semester, and find that the school isn’t for me. I need more of an infrastructure of technology and STEM (but I will keep my main reason confidential for now as I do not want to disclose it in a thread). Mostly As, couple A- senior year due to senioritis, but about 10 5s, 4 4s on ap exams too.

I was waitlisted from Columbia/Penn last year, and have strengthened my ECs and def my essays, but I’m not sure if 2 A-/A might hurt me or not.

I have published research, nonprofits, internships, and a business that are all tied under the same narrative, but I don’t know academically if I am held back.

Columbia (ppl have transferred to columbia from my school last few years), UPenn, Stanford, Brown (past history from my school has shown successful transfers), UChicago, are all on my list.

im not aiming for H/Y/P bc of the low rates, and just don’t like the MIT environment.

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Good luck.

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You could improve your odds by adding some less Reachy research universities. I’m not sure of your field, but Rochester perhaps, or publics with strong research programs in your area.

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Do you really want to transfer or do you only care about transferring to top schools? With that list, you could get into some, or you could get rejected from all. No one can really say. But if you are sure that your current school is not a good fit and that you want to leave, you should apply to schools that are easier to get into. A lot easier to get into. Not a couple percentage points easier than HYPSM. Frankly, this list make it look like you care about prestige a lot more than you care about transferring.

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No NYU? No Northwestern? No Carnegie-Mellon?

Cornell?

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What does this mean? Are you asking if the top LAC is academically holding you back?

All you can do is put in apps and see what happens. If you are certain you want to transfer, you will have to add at least one school that is a likely admit.

Are there any schools you were admitted to last year that are of interest?

Do you have any financial constraints or are you applying without asking for financial aid?

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NYU doesn’t really have the research capability, CMU is great but I sort of want a more interdisciplinary environment, and Northwestern is act on my list i might have forgot to mention

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no i’d prefer a larger institution with strong facilities

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I have more like northwestern which is easier, but these were my main two

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yeah im applying to chicago, stanford, northwestern, but im not too deadsst on transferring more of shooting my shot

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This is also a problem at Bowdoin College where profs in neuroscience and CS complain of having too many advisees (up to 50 per professor) and inadequate resources to meet the demand. (Professors are doing research, supervising students doing individual research, teach classes, and have dozens of individual advisees).

Bowdoin College is experiencing a battle between humanities disciplines with declining enrollment & lower demand versus disciplines like CS and neuroscience and data science which are in high demand and cannot meet the demand due to inadequate resources.

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I’m not quite sure I understand this statement.

You listed Columbia, Penn, Stanford, Brown, and Chicago, all of which are mid-sized private R1 universities. R1 is a reference to their Carnegie Classification. As this helpful article explains:

[R1] universities have a very high level of both research activity and per capita in such research activity, using aggregate data to determine both measurements. In other words, these institutions provide a lot of resources for research and have a lot of people conducting research at their respective institution. These two classifications can be seen as the aggregate supply and demand for research, respectively.

OK, then the University of Rochester, which I provide as an example of a less Reachy transfer possibility, is also a private mid-sized R1, as indicated in the chart at that article. There are 39 total such private R1 universities, and another 107 public R1 universities.

Some people also sometimes look at the AAU, which is a 69-member, invitation-only subset of R1s. Again, a helpful article:

The universities you named are also all AAU members, as is Rochester. In total there are 31 total private AAU universities, and another 38 public, in the US.

Normally I would suggest people particularly interested in the general research of their institution might want to look through the list of R1s, or possibly just the AAUs, for suitable candidates.

Of course if you are interested in some specific fields or subfields, you could focus on those. For that purpose, I like Edurank. Not knowing what fields or subfields interest you, I cannot make any specific recommendations.

In any event, the good news is many of the R1s/AAUs are considerably less difficult transfer targets than the specific ones you have named so far. So, if you don’t find institutions like Amherst or Williams suitable, but you do find institutions like the ones you named suitable, there may be quite a few options available for you even if you are not successful at the ones you named.

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So you’re at the top LAC in the country, want to leave due to size, but now we find out - but only if I get into an equivalent four bigger?

Hmmmmm

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Not sure there’s a question buried in your posts. Will you get in? Nobody knows. Will you be happier somewhere else? Nobody knows. Do colleges often admit someone as a transfer that they wait listed a year earlier? Some do and some don’t.

Etc. What are you hoping to get from your thread?

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I think OP is looking for reassurance that a 3.85 from W/A won’t hurt their chances to transfer to a prestigious university. I don’t have an answer to that…

Edit: OP, will you only transfer if you are accepted into a school you consider more prestigious (or one generally considered to have more name recognition since you’re at a LAC) than your current school? I ask not looking to judge but wanting to clarify before others spend time suggesting easier admit schools- though you may be happier at one of them. But if you don’t wish to give up the significant prestige of your current institution then that’s your call

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MIT is a fit school. MIT is a good fit for some academically very strong students, but is definitely not a good fit for all academically very strong students. Recognizing a bad fit and just not applying is a good idea and a sign that you have spent some time thinking this through.

All are of course reaches. All accept very few transfer students.

I understand that you do not want to publicly state the exact nature of what you are looking for, and the second word in this web site’s name is “confidential”. This makes it hard for us to evaluate how valid this reason is. However, I am assuming that you have described this academic reason to want to transfer to the schools that you have applied to. Having a good academic reason to transfer is important when you are trying to transfer into any of the top ranked schools in the US. The fact that you are already at an exceptionally strong school and are doing well will make the point that you are academically capable of doing well at pretty much any university. All of this might help your chances.

However, they are still reaches.

The most likely outcome is that your applications will be rejected. You might want to think for a day or two: If this happens, are you okay finishing your bachelor’s degree where you are, or would you wish that you had applied to transfer somewhere else?

If you do complete your bachelor’s where you are, and if at some point in the future you are looking to apply to graduate programs, then Columbia, U.Penn, Stanford, Brown, Chicago, and Northwestern will still be there, will still have many excellent graduate programs, and will still know how excellent Amherst College and Williams College are.

To me there appear to be two risks here. One is that you do not get accepted anywhere, and complete your bachelor’s degree where you are. The word “risk” might not be quite the right word when describing the possibility of graduating with good grades and good research experience from the #1 LAC in the USA. The second risk is that you transfer, and discover that nowhere is perfect, and you should have stayed where you were. I think that only you have any reasonable chance of judging how likely it is that either of these outcomes would be something you might be concerned about.

But it does seem like you are doing well where you are, and you are likely to do well wherever you end up.

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There is no such thing as “hurt my chances” when it comes to the schools on the OP’s list! These schools take who they take in the transfer process and it’s not as though there’s a point system which shows who gets in and who doesn’t. The numbers are relatively small and each transfer has a story to tell… so it’s pretty difficult to suss out any trends or patterns.

The best “story” for a transfer IMHO is to make a strong case for why the current school does not have the right academic resources based on the students need, and how the student will contribute substantially to life on campus in the three years remaining. Assuming the OP has done that, the only thing left to do is wait it out, and to continue to perform at the current college.

I will say that the intersection of the OP’s academic interests (understanding that MIT is off the list) might be a different set of U’s. For pure academics, the right mixture of STEM etc. might be at CMU, JHU, RPI, etc. Columbia is a fine university but depending on the STEM interests of this student, it might be way down the list of “where to go” for a particular department.

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sorry i was unclesr the size of the institution isn’t the important part it’s the quality of the research and the interests i have are more covered at columbia penn

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I guess we have Lin-Manuel Miranda to blame.

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Again without knowing the fields or subfields you are looking at, it is hard to make specific suggestions, so I will instead point you to the resource I mentioned before, Edurank, and suggest how you could use it.

Edurank’s field and subfield rankings are purely research publication based. That is very crude, but it is also empirical and rigorous, so I like it for that reason. Obviously you should treat this as merely one possible starting point, and go into specific departmental and faculty webpages once you have identified some possibilities.

Anyway, as noted I don’t know your interests, but you mentioned STEM, and I know Penn and Columbia are both strong in Bio research, so we can use that as an example:

Sure enough, in the US, Penn is at #8, and Columbia at #15, so that is very good. But using 2023-24 CDS data, Penn had a 4.6% transfer admit rate, and for Columbia it was 10.1%. These are typically extremely competitive pools, so many students who have done well in college so far will not be admitted as transfers.

Fortunately, however, some very good publics are also high on that list. They include institutions like Washington at #5 (46.1% transfer admit rate), Wisconsin at #13 (47.5%), and Minnesota at #16 (52.6%). Obviously these are not guaranteed either, but I think it is fair to say publics like this are, among other things, quite interested in your sort of case–a very good student who ends up feeling like they are at the wrong sort of college, or at least at a college with the wrong sort of department given their emerging interests, and who would benefit from transferring to a college with the right sort of department.

Of course this is not to say I know Penn or Columbia won’t admit you as a transfer. And I chose Biology, not you, so obviously you might get a different list with a different field or subfield. But for pretty much every field or subfield I am aware of in which Penn and Columbia would do well by this measure, so would some publics with much higher transfer acceptance rates.

Of course if you would rather stay at your LAC than go to such a public, that is entirely up to you. But since you are talking about things like the quality of the research program, I thought it was worth pointing out there are usually these departments doing great research which are at institutions more open to transfer cases just like yours.

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