I have posted this on the college admission forum as well, but since the core part of my plan is to transfer, so I guess I should be able to get something useful from here as well.
Some background:
(1) Graduated highschool with good but not great stat (Sat: around 2000, Act: lower 30’s, GPA: about 3.8)
(2) Applied around 10 schools this year, but get rejected by almost all of them, from high reach to low match (except for one that i have no way afford to go)
(3.1) I know exactly what’s wrong with my application and what I did wrong strategically in the whole college admission process
(3.2) And the largest problem by far is that I simply get to know about things too late and therefore have not prepare enough for the whole process
(4) If I have to go through all that again (and I wish to), I am confident that I can do at least thrice as good, either in general or test-score-wise.
(5) The only acceptance I have on hand are from some state school and a somewhat renowned, at least locally, foreign university (I will describe that in detail below), which are effectively my safeties.
(6) Whichever path I choose, I wish to eventually transfer back to my real top choices (namely, MIT and Rice). Call me unrealistic. I understand fully how difficult and how risky would that be, but I still want to aim for it.
So now, my choices are:
(1) Go with the foreign university for the first 2 years then transfer back to the US
This is originally the path that I tended to choose. Since one of the main defect of my application is that I don’t have enough significant experience, so I was think going to a foreign university will be a strong way to supplement that. But after cooling down from the emotion I got from all the rejections I received, and the more I think about it, the more I feel unsafe (and that’s essentially why I make this thread at this somewhat subtle point of time.)
The main concern I have in that school is that, unlike many of the American colleges, schools in there seldom use absolute grading. They curve essentially everything, and they try hard to control the number of A’s in every class. So it is not unusual that someone have an overall score of 9x% can only obtain a B – just because there have too many people above 9x%. Moreover, there are always some of those “testing-mechine” kind of people around, who, no matter how high or low you score, can always score perfect on everything. Given that the prime condition for me to successfully transfer is my GPA, together this is putting on me an incredible amount of pressure – I just can’t afford to lose my chance of transfer, just because the way they give grades.
**As a side note, I used to live in the country of that foreign school, so I have no problem integrating into the society and the culture in there nor do I have a problem in the language.
(2) Take a gap year, reapply to an instate school, then fight for transfer
Like I said earlier, I was originally planned to go to that foreign school, so I had not pay my deposit for saving my seat in the state universities that accepted me. And given that it is already that late in the college admission cycle, I will unavoidably have to take a gap year then reapply, if I were to stay in US.
And being a resident of Louisiana, I notice that I am quantify for a guarantee admission in Tulane University if I apply through EA. ( Which I haven’t notice last year when I first to apply, and I have confirmed with Tulane that I am still qualifying for this guarantee admission as long as I haven’t attend any other school) Of course, I can also reapply to those school who rejected me eariler, but I guess that will be nothing more than an meaningless suicide.
Then, in this case my concern will be having to take a gap year – I just have no plan or idea whatsoever for what to do in that gap year at the moment, nor do I know if that really worth to take at all. At least, everyone I talk to recently vote against that.
Moreover, having to stay in almost the same kind of place as in the past, I am kind of afraid that can’t provide me enough of an impact to significantly improve (or at worst, change) my application.
I don’t know. My whole situation is just getting so complicated that even having to write that much still can’t fully present the whole situation. But I hope that can at least get me some feedback.
Sorry for bad grammar and typos. I am kind of tired while writing this, and I try to rush through it while keeping it short, so I may overlook some mistake.
Thank you.