What can I have done differently? :(

Transfer Students
1

Hey all,

So in the last few days, I received rejections from every private college I applied to - Brown, Cornell, Rice, and Stanford. I am still waiting to hear back from Tufts, but I am probably going to get rejected.

My question for you all is - what can I have done better or differently? I honestly don’t understand why I got rejected? Here are my stats just for reference:

  1. Started college fulltime at age 15 in high school - that’s why I came to a community college
  2. 3.9 GPA
  3. 4 Letter of recs (Professor who went/worked at Harvard, President/Superintendent of my college, 2 more)
  4. Essay that was reviewed by an old admission officer from Stanford and old admission officer from USC.
  5. Extracurriculars: CEO of my own startup, President of my student government’s college, many more
  6. Working 3 jobs (45 hours a week) and taking a full course load every semester
  7. Ethnicity South African and Asian Indian

I received admission into UCB and UCD, but I feel as if a private school will better fit my needs because of the size and because I want to attend graduate school. Do you think it’s worth it to appeal?

Thank you

2

You want to know why? Because 90% of qualified applicants get rejected for transfer. I don’t know exact numbers, but transferring to those institutions is extremely, extremely difficult. Way more so than freshmen. You are a bright student and you’ve done a lot.

UCD and UCB are both excellent. All you need is one acceptance. All you can do is move on and hopefully go to one of the privates for grad school—which btw is very possible at UCB/UCD.

3

Don’t feel too down about it. These are schools that have a 4% acceptance rate. After stats reach a certain point, all of the applications look identical to another. All of them have a 3.9. All of them have an ACT of 34. All of them can write great essays. All of them do extracurricular stuff. It’s impossible to stand out.

In my opinion, private schools aren’t worth the money and hyper competition anyway. It’s no more a bachelors degree than a UCB. Take what you have and be happy. Those are great schools! :slight_smile:

4

You can also look at the NACAC list of colleges that miscalculated yield to see if you find a college you like better.

5

If this is your entire list of transfer applications, then you did nothing wrong. You applied to a whole bunch of extreme reaches that do not admit many transfer applicants at all, and you applied to some solid state Us that will work just fine for your goals.

Here is the link for the NACAC list of places with space available. Maybe you will find something you like better. https://www.nacacnet.org/news–publications/Research/CollegeOpenings/

But truly, wherever did you get the notion that UCB or UCD can’t get you into grad school? They are basically pre-grad school machines.