CCC Intended CS Major Looking For EC/Transfer Advice

Transfer Students UC Transfers
1

Hi, I am a CCC student and I was hoping someone could give me insight on what I’m doing right or wrong to prepare myself for applications next Fall. I am hoping to transfer to Cal or UCLA, so I know competition is stiff. If anyone out there who has gone through the transfer process before could inform me how competitive I am, I would highly appreciate it. Anyways, here’s an overview of what I’ve been doing this past year:

Class: Freshman

Intended Major: Applied Math or LSCS for Cal, EECS everywhere else

GPA: 4.0 Summer 2016, 4.0 Fall 2016, on track for 4.0 Spring 2017.

Work Experience: Interned at an IT recruitment company 2015-2017 (I made training videos for new recruiters about the software industry), currently a private math tutor for K-12 since Summer 2016

Clubs: AGS honors club member, PTK honors society/club member, CS club member (looking to get a leadership position in the fall)

Programs: Honors Project student (researching genetic algorithms and their applications), UCB TAP (first generation Irish-Croatian, neither of my parents went to college), on my way to getting into UCLA TAP

Hobbies: Hackathons (haven’t placed yet, last one attended was SBHacks), web development, programming AI algorithms, teaching myself electronics through arduino, teaching myself machine-learning through coursera (don’t have the linear algebra background yet so I might not be able to complete it), piano (I like to play be ear, have been learning to play freebird by lynyrd skynyrd on piano for the past few months)

To Do List: Make a website for my family’s business, currently making a personal site, get a software internship (had an interview already but got turned down because I have not taken data structures yet), join a summer research team (applied to Berkeley’s TTEREU program but still waiting on decision, also applying to Google summer of code and anything else I can find), attend more hackathons

This is all the stuff I can really put on an application for now. Aside from that I scored in the low-mid 700s on each category of the sat totaling to a 2140, got 31 on my act, 790 on math 2 subject test and 740 and chem subject test. My high school gpa was about 3.4 unweighted and 3.7-3.8 weighted (hence why I came to community college). Please let me know what you think and if you have any advice on improving my chances before applications open, it would help me a lot. thanks, have a good day.

2

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/transfers-major can show you the 25th-75th percentile GPAs of transfer admits by major at each campus, and the admission rates.

Presumably, you are completing as many prerequisites as you can as listed on http://www.assist.org ?

3

Yeah I’m taking all the assist courses I can at my community college.

4

Try to keep up your good work. Getting only one B for a 3 units class can make your gpa becomes 3.96, 8 units would be 3.89. Of course this is just relative, depending on how many units in total you finish. It drops drastically, but to gain back 0.01, you may need to get all A for a fulltime semester. However, even if you get a B, you are still very competitive, so dont be upset if that happens.

5

Thanks for the feedback, but would you say that there’s anything else I can do to make myself more competitive? I really want to cement myself as a strong applicant to my top schools.