Bad Highschool GPA, Great College GPA

Transfer Students
1

<p>I went to a very strenuous boarding school for high school. I did horribly my freshman year (transition issues) and ended up with something around a 3.3 for my overall GPA. However, I earned around a 3.5 the last 3 years of high school.
SAT: 2260 (800, 730, 730)
SAT IIs: 800, 740, 710
Extracurriculars:
Head of 2 Clubs, participated in one other
Volunteered almost every summer
Tutored
Played 2 varsity sports
Studied abroad</p>

<p>Right now, I am a freshman at Notre Dame. I really dislike the atmosphere. I am not being challenged at all and I miss the intellectual atmosphere I had in high school. Not to mention it is incredibly far away from home and the weather is awful. This past semester I earned a 3.882 after narrowly missing As in two classes. </p>

<p>I want to transfer to Dartmouth. I am also considering Brown and Columbia. Do I have a shot?</p>

<p>Thank you</p>

2

<p>You have mixed predictors (e.g., low grades and high SATs), which just doesn’t bode well for you as a sophomore transfer. Wait a year and, assuming you maintain your GPA, you’ll have a solid chance at some Ivies.</p>

3

<p>Would it hurt my chances for junior transfer if I apply this year?</p>

4

<p>A 3.9 is definitely a good college GPA. I say you have a decent chance, and your SATs are strong, so I’m going to say that you should apply as a sophomore transfer. However, Trojan’s advice is also very good.</p>

5

<p>The grades are not low if it was an Exeter/Andover level high school. Did you try schools at that level last year? It’s pretty unlikely to get into a school after a term of college that you could not have gotten into out of HS.</p>

<p>I only have a single point of anecdotal evidence about whether it will hurt your chances next year to apply now. There was a poster on these boards who was waitlisted at Dartmouth when he applied after his freshmen year and rejected when he applied again for junior transfer.</p>

<p>If you seek an intellectual atmosphere, I’d focus on Columbia. I have a son who is a very happy sophomore at Dartmouth, but he would not call it intellectual. Search the archives (Dartmouth board) where the subject as been discussed.</p>

6

<p>I did in fact go to one of those two schools. I did not apply to any of these three universities last year, but I was rejected from HYP. To be honest, I think it was mostly because I got a C in AP Chem (although I got a 5 on the AP test) my junior spring and did very poorly my freshman year.</p>

7

<p>Also, my brother graduated from Columbia, if that makes any difference.</p>

8

<p>You have a 3.88 at a top private school (I had to reread your post just to make sure I could believe the responses I was reading); yes, applying for junior standing would give you a better shot, but I think you have a great shot as it is (and there’s no harm in trying twice; it shows dedication, if anything).</p>

<p>People here talk as if having a bad HS GPA makes you automatically only a junior transfer, like it’s some hard rule. That’s absolute nonsense. I’m a living example of an exception to the rule, and my stats were (WAY) worse than yours. So long as I exist, I’ll continue to tell people to try, because you’ll never know who’ll bite.</p>

9

<p>FH is right that it’s not a hard and fast rule, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to advise the OP to wait a year if she’s set on transferring to a top school. I’m unclear about how applying multiple times affects your chances, but I think that you should apply when you are as competitive as you can possibly be, i.e., next year (assuming you maintain your GPA and good standing etc.). </p>

<p>If in fact applying multiple times doesn’t negatively affect you, you could do two rounds of applications and hedge your bets. You just have to figure out if you really want to go through the essays, stress, emotion, transferitis et al twice. I can only speak for myself, but once was definitely enough.</p>

10

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<p>It really doesn’t matter; if anything, the persistence is viewed as a positive. And I do think it’s unreasonable to advise waiting a year if the OP has a strong chance this year. Yes, there is a risk of incurring the same stress twice, but that is far outweighed by the possibility (in this case, a strong one) of being be able to spend an extra year at the school of one’s dreams. Two years go by so quickly, and I’m more than thankful I was able to spend three years at my university.</p>

11

<p>That’s what I was thinking with the whole dedication/persistence idea, but I think it only helps if the new application brings something else to the table.</p>

12

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<p>Right, and I think (from my experience from being at the table of these decisions) that persistence pays off. Moreover, aside from my experience of being on the other side of the admissions process, I can also speak from my experience of having applied three (yes, three) times to a school (rejected once as a freshman, rejected again for sophomore standing, and admitted for junior standing); my application didn’t substantively change between my second and third attempts. In fact, my GPA went down by .2.</p>

13

<p>PS. The above is definitely the best you’re going to get. There’s no sense in calling an admissions office to ask about this, as you will never get a straight answer, so asking the OP to make a determination as to whether applying twice is detrimental is inefficient at best.</p>

14

<p>OK, thank you for your advice! I just have one more question: Do you know how much more challenging Brown, Columbia, and Dartmouth are compared to ND? That would help a lot with my decision.</p>

15

<p>None of them are substantively more challenging. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, Brown’s grading system is A/B/C (no + or -), and any grade lower than that is not reported on the transcript; there’s no core curriculum; and you can P/F as many courses as you want (though that’s not wise if you plan to go to a graduate or professional school).</p>

<p>Columbia, on the other hand, has a very rigorous core curriculum. If you got into Columbia, you might want to consider how many of your current credits would satisfy that core, and whether you’d have to deal with those pesky, huge, and atrociously curved introductory courses; as a sophomore transfer, though, you shouldn’t take having to do a few more of those as an offense.</p>

16

<p>If you are looking for rigor, have you thought about Johns Hopkins or Northwestern?</p>

17

<p>I haven’t really looked at either of those. Northwestern is even further away than ND, and Johns Hopkins has a really cutthroat reputation.</p>

18

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<p>Can you tell us what your experience is? You’re throwing out a lot of advice that is dubious.</p>

<p>Having been an adcom at an ivy, I can tell you that by applying to a school a second time, you are asking adcom to say they made a mistake rejecting you the first time. Conventional wisdom in the admissions world is you’ll have better luck as a transfer at schools you didn’t apply to before.</p>

<p>This is an unusual case. Not getting into HYP was unlikely due to one bad grade. The competition from A & E is brutal. They have so many legacies, recruited athletes and URMs, you have to be a world class applicant if you don’t have a hook.</p>

<p>Frankly, ND is considerably down the food chain from HYP. I’m guessing you had to have applied to some schools between the mighty three and ND. What happened at those schools should give you a good read for transferring to a lower ivy so soon.</p>

<p>I’m not discouraging you, we don’t have enough info to really guess.</p>

19

<p>Actually, I did not. I applied to a very exclusive dual degree program, Amherst, UVA, BC, and Hamilton (in addition to ND and HYP, of course).</p>

<p>And it was only one bad grade during my last 3 years, but my freshman year was pretty bad. I ended up spending a year abroad at a different school, and then returned and brought my grades up.</p>

20

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<p>1) I’m sure you weren’t an “adcom” at an Ivy; you were probably an admissions officer, unless your committee only comprised one person… you.
2) Having been an admissions officer at top private, I can tell you that I never perceived an application that way (and neither did others on my committee). I think this situation is rather unique to transfer admissions, as I don’t think you’re asking an admissions officer to say they made a mistake rejecting the student initially: There’s been a substantive change in the application (namely, the addition of a great college record, and hopefully the applicant will also have distinguished herself in other ways). Yes, if the application were exactly the same, I’d say you’re asking an admissions officer to make the admission you discussed.</p>

<p>Moreover, I’m surprised you actually reviewed the transfer applications of students who previously applied as freshmen; this isn’t sarcasm, as I’m actually curious as to how that happened. Was it pure luck? Were application readers assigned to the applicant for freshman standing automatically assigned to the same applicant for sophomore or junior standing? This just doesn’t make sense.</p>

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<p>And this is definitely where your advise becomes dubious. As a person who worked against your “wisdom” successfully, I can inform you that this piece of advice is completely incorrect. My top private had many disgruntled freshmen, disappointed that they couldn’t attend a “mighty three” because they were rejected. Well, guess what? So many of them worked their butts off, applied again, and got in (if anything, it seemed that coming from a top private gave them a better shot). This happened every year (though, surprisingly, many of them chose to stay put… I guess they realized they liked the school after all). But I can tell you that there were at least 10-20 students every year who made it into at least one of HYSPenn every year (that was back then; I know Harvard no longer takes transfers). All of them were rejected previously. Stack those numbers on the successes of many CCers here who got into schools from which they were previously rejected, and you’ll eventually realize that my situation wasn’t an exception to the “conventional wisdom”; rather, the “conventional wisdom” is that you should keep trying. </p>

<p>P.S. Harvard admits what… 2,000 freshman every year out of like 20,000 applicants, right? I’d wager that the preponderance of that 20,000 were academically competitive. You’re telling me that an admissions officer actually had substantive grounding for rejecting every single one of those 18,000 applicants? You’re telling me than an admissions officer would be able coherently to recite the rationale for rejecting a given application when it comes up for review as a transfer (assuming you were assigned the application)?</p>

<p>Give me a break. Though I’m sure there were many applicants rejected for substantive reasons, there were also many applicants who were great but your “intuition” just went with someone else. In my opinion, with such a competitive applicant pool, the notion that your decision-making actually has a coherent rationale operating behind it that really isn’t just your gut instinct is a joke at best and a lie at worst.</p>