Busy Mom
This is not correct-
“However, if you wait and apply to transfer during your college sophomore year, you are basically a “new” applicant and only your college grades/scores and college EC’s are seen.”
Tip top colleges keep records of applications for 3 years, NOT 1.
And the colleges the OP wants a second shot at -
"Looking into a few ivys (Stanford, Penn, Dartmouth, Harvard) and Stanford primarily. "
have acceptances rates that are even lower for transfer students than those for Freshman.
So it is very, very likely to be a waste of time to reapply to those same colleges.
Which is what we said in Nov.