What are my chances

Gatman
Sun, 30 Jul 2006 03:33:27 +0000

Hello all,

I am interested in transfering to Drexel University in Philadelphia. I am currently enrolled at Southern Illinois University college in Carbondale, IL. The school here is terrible and I really dislike the whole area. I miss living in an urban area. I am from Chicago and being out in the middle of nowhere is kind of a culture shock for me.

I am hoping to transfer to a more prestigious school and to an urban area outside of IL. I want to find a school that does not require a car, is in an environment that does not get so hot or humid, and is going to allow me to have fun while I am there.

A little history of myself may be in order.

I am 24 (25 in September), hispanic male. Neither of my parents are college graduates and my mother is a high school dropout. Both of my younger sisters are in college. One is studying art at the local community college and the other is a grad student in engineering at Purdue university. I am the black sheep of the family (or was).

I have a 3.098 GPA at my current school. This is a big improvement over my highschool GPA which was somewhere along the lines of one point something or other. IT was low and I was a hellraiser in high school. I had been thrown out of high school 9 times. I went to emotionally disturbed schools, learning disabled schools, and behavior disorder schools. Eventually I went to a state run military school and I got kicked out of that. I maybe able to get a few letters of recomendation from some of the teachers who liked me (hard to believe there were any) both in college and high school.

As I stated earlier I have a 3.098 GPA. I am a sociology major and can probably finangle a letter of recoomendation from a teacher I had. The problem was that she was a grad student and I am worried that this will affect how seriously other schools take her.

I have a teacher who agree to write me a letter of recomendation as well. He is the head of the Sociology Department and has a good reputation in the sociological community.

Both of them were sociology teachers and proffessors. I have passed all of my Sociology classes with As and Bs. I have 48 credits and most of them are general education credits. Math, English, and electives.

I failed one class. It was a Zoology 115 class that I recieved an F in (I simply did not want to get up that early). I retook the class and my school put it on as a Plant BIology Class which I recieved a B in. It was the exact class but the teacher was different. I am going to ask the school if there is any way to take the course I failed out and keep only the one I passed on my transcripts and/or GPA.

I applied to U of Washington before but I did not get in. My GPA was lower and I had a lot less credits. Now I have brought the GPA above a 3.0 (it was 2.89 before) and increased the number of credits to 48 instead of 33.

The schools I am interested in are in order of desire to attend:

Penn State University (University Park Campus)
University of Washington
University of Florida
Florida State University
University of Texas at Auxstin
Texas A&M
Temple in Philadelphia
University of IL

Thanks to all who reply.