<p>Coming from a private school already in California, the odds of you being accepted to the UC system, be it LA or Cal, are almost non-existent. Community College students are given first priority at transfer (Making up 85%~90% of admits), then UC-UC transfers (for LA, don’t know if Cal even has this tier of priority), THEN private schools, putting you on the bottom of the totem pole. </p>
<p>Stanford takes around 1% of applicants, so I would be hesitant to even bother with it unless you have an amazing experience or can bring something almost totally unique to the table (Special Forces training, de-worming orphans in Somalia etc…) </p>
<p>Assuming that you have good grades at the end of freshman year, I’d recommend trying for University of Chicago, Columbia, Brown, Cornell and NYU. Going for Harvard and Yale will be incredibly difficult but they have better acceptance rates than Stanford, so it could be worth a shot.</p>