I was very active on this forum over the past year as GW was one of my top schools. I applied to GWSB for the BBA in Finance and was deferred to Columbian for Economics. Because of that - I ended up enrolling at UVA (for Economics).
I’m a 3rd year right now, and am finding myself very unhappy at UVA. Truly, I’m a city guy; and while UVA seemed extremely appealing as a change, I’m finding that the culture and vibe here is degrading my ability to thrive.
I was wondering if anyone is aware of adcoms holding “grudges” on students that didn’t accept their offers before and now want to come back. Should I even bother applying? The deadline is in a week - and I can surely have all my materials in time if I act now.
Applied w:
3.5 GPA from CC
Multiple EC/Leadership roles
Upward trend
Really good work experience
Killer letters of rec/essays
Won’t have any UVA coursework completed so it’ll be the same stats. I’ll have my Associate’s degree.
Courses completed: up to Calc 2, Statistics 2, Micro/Macro Econ, Financial/Managerial Acc. All with A’s & B’s - so I don’t think there will be any issues coming in as a junior spring transfer. I’d also be willing to have to delay graduation…
@Msport Sorry to hear that your experience at UVA is not going as expected…I can definitely relate to your situation and hopefully have some input to offer. First things first, you should be able to transfer again. I was originally a student at Northern Virginia Community College who was accepted into UVA through the guaranteed admissions. However, I elected to try out this university 2 miles away from Yale called the University of New Haven. UNH gave me a hefty scholarship and I already knew I was attending the Yale Writers Conference so I figured why not. My naive self soon learned that UNH did not have a very good reputation and that actually Yale apparently doesn’t like to take UNH grads (a legal professor who I grew really close with at UNH told me that more than likely they wouldn’t take me from here. She had attended Yale Law School herself and had given me some of the best life advice…one piece being to transfer to George Washington University). All together I spent three semesters at UNH: Fall, Spring, Summer. I did get to take classes at Yale but I realized that was no substitute for a respectable degree from a quality home university. So my choices were go back to VA and transfer to UVA or GW. I was able to get out of that place with some amazing life advice, walk away with some Yale credits and attend GW. Long story short, you should probably be able to transfer here.
Transferring in a way can be like the end of a cruddy marriage; transferring can be financially, emotionally and physically exhausting. I also sometimes blame US News & World Report for these sort of debacles. Why? While it’s important to have rankings, the degree to which universities are vying for a spot in the top rankings has honestly lead to a lot of corruption in universities and students. But also some of the marginal differences in rankings may not be truly accurate and don’t account for a studen’ts subjective experience at a university- not that they’re necessarily supposed but rather suggesting students need to be less naive and take these sort of factors into consideration. (not saying you’re naive either). A university ranked 30 nationally may not really be a better choice for a student than a university ranked 40 in a location that the student likes or is familiar with. In the context of my decision, George Washington University was a better choice for me because I felt it would be a little bit easier to stand out here, travel in and out of my hometown, and generally just have more cool stuff to do since its in the city. Rankings matter but you should never take them so seriously to the extent that you’re not daft to other perhaps nonobvious factors that will contribute to your experience at a university. If you were already accepted, I doubt that would discriminate against your application for deciding to transfer to UVA first. Honestly, the best thing to do would be to either visit or call the admissions office but I’m sure you’ll be fine.