<p>Hi everyone,
I am an international student from southeast Asia, and I would to ask several questions in regards to how class withdrawals would affect my chances to get into a top graduate economics program (Princeton, Stanford, etc)</p>
<p>This fall, I am going to transfer to UC Berkeley from my community college as an Applied Math in Economics Major. Nonetheless, there were several flaws that I committed in my last 2 quarters. On Spring 2012, I took Calculus 3 (Series, implicit differentiation, and vector calculus) and I withdrew from it. </p>
<p>My main reason was, there was a class (English 1C) that I mentioned I am going to take in my UCB application, and it started in middle Spring, and conflicted with this Calculus 3 class. I withdrew the class, and registered for the English 1C class. However, the class was canceled by my college, since there were only 4 students who registered for the class. Hence, I did not get into the English class, and decided to take my math class in Summer.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, I did not do really well in my Summer Math class (my grade was between a B and B+) and I withdrew again from the course, since I did not want to risk my acceptance to UC Berkeley (I have to get at least a B from the class).</p>
<p>They are my only withdrawals in these 2 years, however, my community college transcript will show that I withdrew from the same class in 2 consecutive quarters. Would you please tell me how bad would these withdrawals affect my chance of going to a top 5 graduate econ programs?</p>
<p>I don’t mean to hijack, but are you suppose to address these peculiarities in your application, or is it better to not mention them and focus on the positives, but answer adequately when asked about them? It’s a two sided case, but I’m wondering which one might be preferable.</p>
<p>^In my experience they never ask about it in an interview or anything like that. </p>
<p>It’s always nice to out-right explain yourself in the application. Otherwise the person reading your application might automatically assume the worst. There is often a spot on apps at the end asking if you want to say anything else in support of your app. My recommendation would be to explain your case out-right so that they don’t theorize about what happened. </p>
<p>I’d say you’d only need to be prepared to address them if they come up in an interview. Otherwise, W’s don’t really mean much. I know a person who got into UCLA with 26 W’s. Kind of crazy.</p>
<p>Grad schools don’t seem to pay much attention to your community college grades. A friend of mine, though, had a couple professors in her interviews (NYU and Vanderbilt) raise an eyebrow and say, “Oh, you went to community college for a year”? Never mind the fact that the year was while she was still in high school.</p>