<p>Greetings everybody. Since I'm sure that everyone is busy attending to academic or professional matters, I will be brief:
I'm currently a freshman at the University of South Carolina-Columbia, as I thought it more prudent to attend a large flagship institution for a very reasonable price rather than be forced to sell my body on the streets of San Fransisco to pay for Cal. I love South Carolina to be sure, but I've recently been entertaining the notion of possibly transferring, as I feel U of SC doesn't quite meet my needs when it comes to prestige or being able to consistently place undergraduates into elite grad programs.
Fortunately, I'm currently an international business major and will enter the Moore School of Business at the end of the next Spring semester. For those who don't know, Moore boasts the USNWR's #1 ranking for undergraduate international business, and has for 14 years now. That said, international business is a fairly broad and ambiguous field to study. To counter this, IB majors are required to double-major in a more specialized area of study, such as economics, finance, accounting, etc. I plan on choosing Economics. We're also required to study overseas for the Spring semester of our Junior year and minor in a foreign language.
That's all great.....and considering that I pay less than 8k a year as an out of state student, it certainly is a bargain that proves difficult to beat. And sure, with all the money I'm saving, I will have procured a substantial capital pool which I can use to finance an elite graduate education.... but with a floundering economy and aspirations beyond the confines of a city where the off-campus aesthetics are mediocre at best, I would be interested in determining my chances of transferring to an institution with more academic clout; preferably one with a well-established international presence such as Penn, NYU, or Georgetown. I've heard the same stale argument again and again: "All that tuition isn't worth just a name." However, as we all know, our world is socially conditioned on an empirical level to accept some brands as more legitimate than others. Thus, I've arrived at my decision to consider opportunities for transferring.
Listed below are my academic statistics, both from high school and U of SC. I would greatly appreciate any feedback as to what I should consider my best bets for transferring into a top 25 undergraduate institution which is more of a target school for the likes of Goldman Sachs, Bain, BCG, etc., namely ones with substantial academic clout and international presence. Thanks, and God bless - Andy
High School Statistics:
GPA: 3.8/4.0</p>
<p>Class Rank: 40/495 at a larger public school in suburban Denver. Most graduates attend Colorado State, CU Boulder, and other large state schools in the region such as Arizona, Arizona State, KU, and Wyoming. Students who go farther away usually attend other large flagships like Ohio State, Texas, and any of the UC's.</p>
<p>ACT Composite: 29 (owing to the fact that I could not perform a rudimentary math operation if someone held a gun to my head); 36's on English and Reading, 23's on Math and Science. Given my obvious inclination to language and reading, I'm also considering law school.
SAT Composite: 1330/1600
AP Credits Earned: 24</p>
<p>EC's: baseball captain, freshman mentor, student council, Junior Class President, 350 hours of community service, NHS, SNHS, 4 year academic letterman, AP Scholar for Language and Composition as well as Literature, started a school-wide community service organization, and organized a now-annual memorial 5k for a special needs student who passed away my Junior year.</p>
<pre><code>University of South Carolina-Columbia Stats (note that these are derived from only my freshman year, which I recognize is generally lax in terms of academic rigor)
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<p>GPA: 4.0/4.0 in the Capstone Scholars group. This is pretty much a fancy title for a Living and Learning community in which I study with about 300 other students like myself (ones who likely had the stats to attend a top 25, but chose scholarship money at U of SC instead). Other perks include first dibs on professors and automatic admittance to the IB program, provided that I've maintained a 3.5 GPA or higher.</p>
<p>Class Rank: Not sure.....probably about a 500-way tie for #1</p>
<p>Current Course Load: ECON 222 (Principles of Macroeconomics), Arabic 122 (basic proficiency), English 285, Philosophy 110 (intermediate logic), and Business Calculus.</p>
<p>EC's: Global Business Council, Finance club, Hiking club, Skydiving club, SCUBA club, Young Republicans club (don't shoot me down here, liberals ;)), Resident Mentor nominee, and founder of the Gamecock Leadership Society, an organization which serves as a liaison between my aforementioned Living and Learning community and university officials.</p>
<p>Miscellaneous Data: Outside of class, I'm an avid guitar, piano, and drum player. I also read voraciously and am thus more inclined to languages, literature, and writing than I am to hard sciences. I'm fluent in Spanish, having lived in Madrid in between my Freshman and Sophomore years of high school. I'm currently studying Modern Standard Arabic, which subsequently spawned my interest in Georgetown, particularly Walsh SFS, and career opportunities with the CIA and Department of State. I've also considered UVa, Penn, NYU, Vanderbilt, Duke, and Emory.</p>
<pre><code>Clearly, I do not have perfect stats in the world of academia. Luckily, my writing ability and personal skills allow me to compensate for this, to an extent of course. I'm looking to transfer not because I hate U of SC, but simply because I believe my intellectual curiosity would be better-satisfied and then more-easily applied towards my aspirations if the name on my degree opens more doors. This thread is not meant to degrade U of SC or it's students; I would simply prefer to grow and study amongst the group of students one tends to find at t-25's, one's which I've found, but in proportionally smaller quanities at U of SC, as opposed to being sucked into the career vacuum large publics tend to create. And of all places I'd hate to live and work, Columbia is near the top. Thanks for any feedback you have. And for reading my manifesto....jeez.....should probably head to the library soon to study up. - Andy
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