<p>I'm in a bit of a debacle. I was a good student, and an active athlete in highschool. I graduated with a 3.24 GPA with decent state testing scores, good SAT scores and I was accepted into the colleges of my choice. Now, freshman year of college for me was kinda rough. I had dealt with some financial instability, and basically spend most of my time struggling to stay aloft, never-the-less make good grades. After falling short of par, the college I was attending decided that It was prudent to congratulate me for being rather stupid and trying to pay for an overly expensive school, and dismissed me. Now I have two semester's worth of college credits, including some AP credits from high school, a bad GPA and a dismissal on my transcript. </p>
<p>Deciding that trying to tediously hump a bad transcript, and falling short of my educational goals is not what I had initially planned, I'm wondering if merely re-applying as a freshman elsewhere would be a prudent choice? I found that some of the credits might not carry anyway, so granted I was willing to maybe spend another semester or two in school further than I was expecting, would it be smart to just start over? Has anyone attempted this before? What forseeable issues should I expect? </p>
<p>Thanks in advance for any advice given.</p>
<p>Colleges have a clearinghouse for exchanging information on where students have studied before (necessary, among other reasons, for avoiding double-dipping in federal student aid programs). So you should be up-front about having studied elsewhere; some colleges would rescind admission if you applied pretending not to have previous college admission when you really did. </p>
<p>That said, you are writing like someone who wants to do the right thing, and I guess in your case the right thing will involve ASKING some other colleges whether they would rather have you apply as a freshman applicant or as a transfer applicant (more likely at most colleges, if you matriculated elsewhere as a freshman before), as long as you are clear about your previous college record. You will of course explain what problems you encountered the last time, and what you intend to do so that they don’t happen again. </p>
<p>The American higher education non-system is full of second chances, so good luck.</p>
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<p>tokenadult, thanks for the info. I wasn’t aware of this information transfer process. This brings me to the next question: When applying for something in my field, post-graduation, and writing my resume, and submitting my transcript I assume it’s going to include my freshman shamble as well? Have you ever heard of a situation where, maybe after some credit redemption, poor pieces of the transcript are replaced/removed?</p>
<p>Well, in general, after you graduate from college, you just say “I graduated from College X,” and no one ever asks you where you started out. I know two men in my generation who each went to FOUR different colleges during their four-year undergraduate degree programs, transferring each year. I’m sure most people who know them know only the place where they got their final degrees. It’s certainly not mandatory to put a situation like yours on a resume, for example.</p>
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<p>Some job application forms do ask you to list every place you have ever studied, dates of attendance, and degrees earned (if any). Occasionally GPA is asked for, but it is much more likely that the major field of study is what the employer asks for. In your case you could write “College X, 9/2009 to 5/2010, undeclared major”.</p>
<p>If you apply to graduate school someday, you will need to send transcripts from every college and university that you have ever attended. So for that situation, yes, this ugly transcript will follow you. The only way to make the bad grades vanish would be if the original institution had a policy whereby you were allowed to re-take the courses and record only the new (and hopefully improved) grades. Some places do this. Others don’t.</p>
<p>But the true good news is that once you get your act together and get good grades at another college/university, anyone who sees both of your transcripts will recognize that your first year was not a good example of the work that you are capable of, and they really won’t care about it. Lots of us have records like that! The final GPA on my undergraduate college transcript is a 2.7. When I changed fields and went back to school later, my GPA at the second place was a 3.7 and I got into the grad school of my dreams.</p>
<p>You can do it too.</p>
<p>Wishing you all the best.</p>
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