I have just finished up my first semester at a private christian university in Tennessee. So far, I have decent grades( a 3.5 GPA so far) but I haven’t enjoyed my overall time here.
I love the academics, my classes, and professors but there’s a lot of other problems. Financially, this school has been rough for me. I have already had to take out nearly five thousand loans for this semester. I wouldn’t have minded the costs so much if I had enjoyed my experience more—my tuition was covered by grants and scholarships, but I still had to cover room/board costs. I live on campus and dislike it. My family doesn’t live in commuting distance of the college, nor can I afford to move to an off campus apartment so commuting isn’t an option for me. Plus, I had planned to be a social work major. The college’s social work program is “still in the process of accreditation.” Also, this is going to sound strange but I’m an atheist/agnostic attending this school. I knew this school had a religious affiliation but I never expected it to be this noticeable. Thankfully, there’s no mandatory chapel but I still had to take a “Christian Faith” class.
My issue is that I want to transfer to a public college. How can I ensure that my credits will even transfer? I am not too worried about my gen eds.(such as Comp 1, Comp 2, and Essentials of Statistics) transferring because those courses tend to be similar at most colleges. I, however, am worried about the classes like Christian Faith. Also, I ran into a problem finding available biology classes this semester. I still haven’t fulfilled that gen ed credit because I took computer apps instead. Do I need to take labs with my science classes for them to transfer??
Another problem is that I may only have a limited number of credits by the end of the year. I planned on transferring after my freshman year was over. However, I am aware that colleges will look at your high school transcript more closely if you have less than 40-60 credit hours. My unweighted high school GPA was…pretty low. Around the 2.5-27 range to be honest. My ACT scores weren’t incredibly low, but fairly mediocre at 21-22.
What should I do? Should I retake the ACT and aim for a better score, like a 25 at least? Would that alone, along with decent college transcripts, “make up” for those horrible high school grades at all? I have also gotten along well with all my professors so would recommendation letters help? I am starting to worry that my options may be limited to continuing to take classes at my current college or go to a community college. I know that it would most likely be too expensive to continue here beyond my freshman year—I already am troubled by the amount of loans I’m taking out, plus I hear that there’s going to be tuition inflation due to it becoming a ‘university.’ There are some other colleges I miraculously got accepted into as a freshman, so should I keep them as safety schools?
It’s not like I’m trying to get into Vanderbilt. I’m trying to get into Austin Peay. I know my college grades, along with my ACT scores, would perhaps make me a good candidate—it’s just my lack of college credits and bad high school grades that are making me doubt it. Something that really worries me is that I hear college grades don’t transfer. So does that mean if I transferred to a community college, the grades I’m making right now wouldn’t transfer? Would this make it harder to ultimately transfer to the university I want? Then again, wouldn’t they ask for all of my college transcripts, meaning they would also see my academics from this college?