Transferring to Harvard

Colleges & Universities Harvard University
1

<p>I am currently a freshman at the University of Maryland College Park. The decision to come to Maryland was a financial one. I am currently a full Banneker/Key Scholar (the most prestigious undergrad scholarship at UMD), so that made my decision easier since I wasn’t admitted to any of the Ivy League schools I applied to. </p>

<p>I want to transfer mainly because I am simply not challenged enough in the classroom and as a result often feel frustrated with the direction my educational career is headed. I am currently an electrical engineering major and I want to go into business and applied math, but the business school here, the economics program, and the math department simply do not offer the same kind of challenge and the same kinds of opportunities that Harvard College does. </p>

<p>I know that when transferring to liberal arts-based schools like Harvard and Stanford one is expected to have a breadth of courses on their transcript. Since I have been an engineering major (first a bioengineering major and currently an electrical engineering major), my schedule has been full of math, science, and engineering courses with no real liberal arts courses (literature, music theory, art history, etc) except for an engineering ethics course which I am taking this semester. Do I have any chance? I have a perfect 4.00 college GPA and I have a 2300 SAT score from high school (750 CR, 750 M, 800 W), where I also earned an unweighted GPA of 4.00. </p>

<p>Also, transferring involves asking professors to write recommendation letters for you to leave their college. How does one go about approaching your favorite professors and asking them for a rec letter for transfer?</p>

2

<p>See your professors during their office hours and ask them for a recommendation at that time. You will not be the first student to ask for a recommendation to transfer out of the University of Maryland, so your professors should have driven down this road before. You will need to make a strong case for yourself about “Why Harvard”, as opposed to any other school with more challenging courses than the University of Maryland.</p>

<p>You should also know that anyone’s chances of transferring to Harvard are very slim. There is a direct correlation between Harvard’s transfer admissions rate and it’s graduation rate. Harvard has the highest graduation rate of any college in the US – 98% of all students graduate. That’s important to understand, because Harvard has just so many available beds. A transfer student can only be admitted to the college if there is an available bed – and only 1 to 2% of current students leave the school per year. So, to compete for that bed, a prospective transfer student must really stand out from the crowd – much more so than than a student applying in regular admissions. Best of luck to you.</p>