Where can I transfer to?

tsakashvili
Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:57:49 +0000

The data you’ve given is a bit limited. High school grades, and even more specifically senior grades are a small part of your application. College GPA, while more important Overall high school GPA; SAT I or ACT and SAT II scores; AP’s, IB’s, A-Levels, or equivalents; professor recommendations; why you want to transfer and other aspects of your personal narrative and essay; extracurriculars; financial aid; legacy status and demographic factors; and institutional and course rigor are all factors colleges consider when evaluating candidates. Now granted, I would say that college GPA, test scores (most importantly on the SAT I or ACT), and high school GPA are probably the most important factors overall, but none of them is big enough to kill you unless you’ve done really badly. By that I mean getting a sub 3.0 GPA in high school, or a really low SAT I or ACT score (like 1500 or 1400; 20 or something similar on the ACT). To get back to my original point here, it’s difficult to give you good advice without knowing more about you.

With that said I will try to give you as good advice as possible, based on what you’ve told. First, I can give you a bit of good news. Having a few B’s and C’s from high school or a low SAT I or ACT score (again unless it’s really low) isn’t going to kill you. I for instance had an unweighted GPA of 3.4 in high school, with 2 C+’s, and a good smattering of B grades, and managed to be accepted as a transfer to both Penn and Brown. Admittedly those grades were in honors or AP courses and I had very high test scores, but the broad point is that some bad grades aren’t going to kill you. College GPA is a bit of a different issue. When it comes to transferring to elite schools, a GPA of about 3.7 or above is table stakes. The vast majority of the people I read about who transfer to elite schools tend to have very high college GPA’s. The 3.92 I got from Vassar in my freshman year undoubtedly was a major reason why Brown and Penn decided to take me. Waiting for your first semester grades before you apply is thus definitely a good step.

As for your broader idea about transferring in your second year, there are a few positives and negatives with that. One positive is that your high school GPA and SAT or ACT scores matter a lot less than if you apply after one year of college. Two years of college provides much more data for universities than one year. The freshness of that data also means that your two years of college are generally considered a better indicator of how you’ll do at their school than your high school GPA and SAT I or ACT scores. Those things are still relevant, and you still have to hand them in, but they couont for much less than if you apply with just one year of college under your belt. If you have a low college GPA and/or low test scores, it can thus be a very good decision to transfer after two years of college.

If you have a really good financial aid package at your present school it might also help you save money. It may well be the case that you might not get as generous a financial aid package from a college you transfer to than from the one you’re currently (if of course you’re currently on financial aid). Many schools see transfer applications as a way to boost their revenue streams, and thus are not need blind in processing transfer admissions. Many schools also have a relatively more limited pool of financial aid available for transfers than for regular applicants, or may not even offer transfer applicants financial aid. Staying a second year at your current school if you’ve got a good financial aid package could thus help save you some money (obviously this is basically irrelevant if you’re not on financial aid already).

Finally, two years of college gives you a while to cultivate a good relationship with professors, and find a few who could write a great application. This is a major part of your application, so it really does matter if you can find two professors who will write dynamite recommendations.

The downside to applying in your second year is that you’re running a risk that you’ll shoot yourself in the foot. If you’ve received good grades in the first semester of your first year, then you’ve already got that under your belt. By contrast, if you apply in your second year, you’ve got to show three semesters of good grades. That’s three semesters of potential glory, but also of great danger. It could be that you take a class that’s way over your head, or that you fall very ill and get behind on your work. A transcript that showed a 4.0 after one semester could easily show a 3.6 or worse, with just a few disastrous low B’s or C’s. Thus, applying in the second year and taking on more semesters carries with it the danger of having one bad semester that sinks your hopes.

Beyond that, it also severely restricts your choice. Schools usually ask people to declare a major at the end of their sophomore year. As a result, most colleges ask transfer students who come in during Junior year to already have declared a major. That means you’ll have fewer chances to take interesting electives and explore your new school’s departments. On top of that, you’ll also probably feel more isolated. Everyone else has already had two years to bond and form groups before you’ve arrived. It’s possible that if you come in as a junior that you’ll therefore feel somewhat isolated and outcast from the rest of the school. Although coming in as a sophomore will also leave you feeling somewhat isolated, sophomore transfers get an extra year to build friendships, and thus can potentially feel more integrated into the university community.

Overall, if you feel confident about your financial situation and your ability to succeed, and you don’t really care that much about your social situation, than a second year transfer can be a good option, particularly given your high school issues. Otherwise, I’d advise you to consider transferring after one year, particularly if you are concerned about your ability to maintain a very high GPA for three semesters instead of one.


The biggest problem I see with your application though is that you don’t have a compelling reason to transfer. This is a very big problem for three reasons: effort, motivation, and overall impression. Firstly, transferring takes a lot of time and work. To get into a high level school, you have to put many hours into the work. The essays alone can suck up days of your life, and getting all the other material (like high school transcripts, professor recommendations, and SAT or ACT scores) sent to the colleges, can take up even more time. At a minimum, say goodbye to your Christmas break, and don’t be surprised if that work spills over into the second semester. Tracking the status of your application and making sure everyone has what they want is an ongoing process that sucks up surprisingly huge chunks of your life. If you’re not dedicated enough to put in that effort, then don’t transfer.
Beyond that, you need motivation. Again, this is partly because of the work. It’s much more difficult to handle all the effort it takes to transfer if you aren’t really motivated to do it. More importantly though motivation counts because you need a good reason for transferring.

After I got into Brown and was deciding between Brown and Penn, I was able to meet with an admissions officer to have some questions answered that would help me chose between Brown and Penn. One question I asked him was “why did Brown take me?” He wasn’t able to remember my specific application (mine after all was just one among several thousand he’d seen), but he gave me some broad reasons why most people get in. Obviously there are good college grades, promising test scores, good recommendations, and all those other factors. What he said though that stuck with me was that having a good reason was very important. He pointed out that it’s obvious why you apply to university after high school. You’ve finished one stage of your development and the next stage, presuming you don’t plan on getting a full time job straight out of high school, is going to college. In essence most people who apply to college out of high school do so because they think there isn’t really a credible alternative (or at least not a more desirable one).

By contrast, if you come from a four year college, you have a very good alternative to transferring: staying at your current school. A transfer applicant therefore needs a strong reason, a motivating factor, that explains why they don’t want to stick with that option, i.e. why they feel that transferring is their best option.

This leads to the final point: overall impression. Without a good reason to transfer, a counselor won’t believe that transferring really is your best option, and by extension that staying at your present school isn’t a poor alternative for you. In particular, the two worst reasons to transfer are “I hate this place”, or your reason, which is that you just want to go to a more prestigious school. On the first point, people who are unhappy about their present school generally make bad applicants because it’s not clear that transferring would solve their problems. If people feel socially awkward, or they resent college life, or other broad factors, it’s often the case that their problem is with the broader college experience instead of that specific institution.

Moreover, colleges want to hear about a positive reason to go to their school. Just wanting to get away from something, a negative reason, isn’t enough. Even if changing schools could solve their problems, it’s not clear that transferring to their specific school instead of any other school would solve their problems. What you need to provide therefore is a positive reason to go to that institution. To give you an example, say a student was applying to Johns Hopkins as a transfer from Bowdoin. A week reason for applying to Johns Hopkins would (hypothetically) be saying “I want to leave Bowdoin because I feel that a liberal arts college isn’t really inclined towards research, and I that doesn’t suit me. Transferring from Bowdoin would let me get away from all that.” A Johns Hopkins admissions person would ask themselves why Hopkins should take them, when any of the hundreds of research universities in America could help them “get away from all that”. They’d also probably feel a bit insulted that the student doesn’t see anything at Johns Hopkins that specifically attracts them. By contrast, making a positive statement like, “I want to transfer to Johns Hopkins because I believe Johns Hopkins has the best biological researchers in the world, and I could really learn a lot by working with those people,” is much better.

Granted, that’s still a pretty vague and poorly developed reason, but it’s still a better one than the first reason because you’re reaching towards something. That shows that there’s something about Johns Hopkins you value, which gives the admissions officer a valid reason to believe that transferring their school in particular represents a really good alternative. That doesn’t mean negative reasons are bad. It just means that you have to pair a negative reason for leaving (“ a liberal arts college isn’t really inclined towards research”) with a positive reason (“Johns Hopkins has the best biological researchers in the field”). A negative reason on its own isn’t good enough. You also have to make sure that your negative reason is a specific and objective reason, so that there is cause to believe that staying at the school represents a legitimately undesirable option that could be overcome by going to somewhere where you wouldn’t face that issue. Finally, you can’t insult the school you’re trying to transfer from. Admissions officers worry that people who are bitter about their current schools will be bitter about their new schools, and thus don’t like to admit them. If you don’t heed these warnings, I guarantee you that you will create a negative first impression that will seriously harm your application.

I don’t think that will be a big problem for you, though it’s worth being aware of it. However there’s another half to creating a good first impression which is having a specific reason why you would benefit from an education at the school you’re transferring to. This is where you have a problem. It seems that the reason you want to transfer is so that you can go to a more prestigious college. This is a very poor reason to transfer, and I guarantee you that transfer counselors hate it. Why? Because transferring for prestige is a way of saying that you don’t actually care about the institution. Prestige is based on the respect other people have for the school. That might be in the form of popular opinion, U.S. News rankings, or some other standard, but the point is that prestige is about others’ perception of the school itself. It’s not related to the quality of the education, the community, or anything else about a university; just the way other people perceive the quality of those things. If you were applying to Brown for example, that really means you’re not applying to Brown because you like and can benefit from it. You’re not applying to benefit from the opportunities the New Curriculum could give you, you’re not applying because you feel that you could really learn from interesting faculty members like David Mumford or Sergei Kruschev, nor are you applying because you like some aspect of the broader community. You’re applying because a Brown diploma impresses other people. That’s the impression an admissions officer gets when you say you’re applying to Brown because it’s prestigious. That’s the impression any admission officer will get when you’re applying to their school because they’re prestigious, and don’t think you can fool them. These people read thousands of applications a year, so they know when someone’s lying. That’s why until you find a better reason than wanting to transfer just so that you can go to a more prestigious school, you’ll create a bad impression.

Overall, that’s why I think you shouldn’t transfer. Your reason isn’t compelling enough to make you put in the effort to write a great application. Even if you do, you’re not motivated enough to come up with a good reason why transferring presents a significantly better alternative than staying at Bowdoin (prestige hunger is by default not a good enough motivator). Even if you do, the reason you want to transfer will definitely create a bad impression in the admissions officer that will sink your application. Finally, it’s worth noting that your current reason doesn’t prove that you deserve to transfer to an elite school, no matter how good your grades are. The people who deserve to transfer to Harvard, for example, are the people with really good grades and test scores who can also genuinely appreciate the unique academic opportunities Harvard offers as an institution of learning, and who get something more out of it than a prestigious diploma. Until you can find what that is for you, how you can benefit as a scholar from an elite institution in addition to the other issues I mentioned, you should not transfer. That’s not saying you’re a bad or incompetent student by any means; rather it’s just saying that at this point you’re not the right type of student to transfer to an elite school. I really hope this helps, and that I’ve answered any questions you may have had as best as I was able to answer them.