Chance Me Please (Kind of urgent)

Hi everyone,

I’m currently a junior at Cornell University who wants to transfer to Yale, Duke, Princeton, and Stanford. I understand that these schools are unbelievably competitive; however, there aren’t many top universities that allow juniors to apply for transfer (most finance target schools don’t allow juniors to apply for transfer admissions). The reason I want to transfer is because I want to switch majors (to do that at Cornell requires internal transferring which i cannot do as a junior) and also because I have SAD and being in Ithaca just exacerbate these symptoms.

I transferred once to Cornell already and at my previous college I had a 4.0 GPA
I currently have around a 3.5 gpa at Cornell (which I know is low for these schools). I tried to stick it out at Cornell; however, I rlly can’t take it anymore (I didn’t even like the school when I visited the school for the first time, esp since I got into other competitive schools like Vandy/Northwestern, etc. My parents pressured me to go here). I tried going to cornell health, etc but just didn’t help AT ALL.

Do you guys think it is worth the time and effort to send apps to these 4 schools?

Thanks in advance!

If you suffer from SAD (seasonal affective disorder), you need to transfer.

Target transfer schools depend upon your major & the weather.

At first glance, it seems that you are letting prestige determine your list of targeted transfer schools when it should be dictated by other factors.

When I mean “target schools”, I mean target schools for Investment Banking (Ivies, Duke, uchicago, stanford, etc). IB tends to be very prestige oriented in regards to targets, which is why my list seems to paint the picture that i’m prestige chasing.

By all means you can try and transfer…but I believe all of your target schools schools will require 2 years attendance to earn your bachelor’s…so you will need to complete 5 years of undergrad. What is your cumulative college GPA?

When writing your ‘why us’ essays, make sure that they are specific to the college AND are things you can’t get at Cornell. So for UChicago and Ivies (and any other cold weather schools) you wouldn’t mention SAD. If SAD is a big factor in your unhappiness, why put any cold weather schools on your list?

Do you have an internship set up for this summer? Really important if IB is your target, even more so if you don’t transfer. Still important if you do transfer, but you would have an additional summer to intern.

Good luck.

I am going to take a different approach, @CollegeSun. As a Cornell alum who has SAD, I am going to suggest you see someone outside Cornell Health for your condition. You need a practitioner who is experienced in treating individuals with SAD. I know deep down that I would have performed much better at Cornell had I had that support, but I didn’t even know about SAD until a few years after I graduated. Wishing you the absolute best!

Also, Duke and Stanford would be the better choices for an individual with SAD.

@whidbeyite2002 My favorite school is Stanford but I know it has a 1% transfer rate. Do you think, given my profile, it is worth applying there?

Thanks

@Mwfan1921 Firstly, I come from the northeast so I’m kind of use to MILDLY cold weather. However, with Cornell/Ithaca, the weather is MUCH colder, it snows/rains/seems gloomy and grey almost every single day, and, on top of that, the extreme isolation gives me a lot of depression as well. Although Princeton and Yale is also in the Northeast the weather/overall environment in CT and NJ is much better relative to Ithaca (I go to NJ a lot so I know that location fairly well).

Do you think i even have a shot at P and Y given my profile and is it worth all the time and effort to apply there?

You have been asking variants of this question in every thread you’ve made. The answers all boil down to ‘SAD is a good reason, but be prepared to spend an extra year in college’.

So why are you still asking? you have only a tiny chance of being accepted at any of those places- but the chances aren’t zero. What’s to lose? Put in your apps and see what happens.

btw, @Mwfan1921 is right that your summer internship matters, no matter where you go to school. In fact, if you are all about getting into a big name IB firm, the internship(s) will matter much more than your major that you are so (apparently) so desperate to change.

@CollegeSun, admissions and transfers to Stanford is extremely unlikely for almost anyone. I know of extraordinary students who have not been admitted. However, I would not say you shouldn’t apply.

I almost never do chances, but by conicidence something I just posted recently, that I never posted before, seems relevant again:

"This one is from antiquity. At one point, following two dean’s list semesters at Cornell I toured Princeton, and had an informal chat about transfer admissions. The fellow said to the effect of, “well we turn down applicants from Cornell with 3.9 GPAs, so…”

That was a really long time ago. admissions is tougher now, it seems.

IMO, unless there is something material and relevant you have not shared, you need not bother with HYPS. You can shoot a “hail mary” to Duke if you want. More realistic chances may be at the schools around Cornell’s selectivity level or easier that accept a decent # of transfers.

This is without consideration of the fact that you are currently a junior. Which may reduce your chances tremendously.

@monydad Thanks for being realistic. I would like to state tho that I have never even seriously considered applying to HYPS ever until now. I mostly stuck to school’s with selectivity similar to cornell such as Northwestern, etc. However, as I’ve mentioned in my post, the problem is many schools around Cornell selectivity like (#11 to ~#25 ranking unis) are not receptive to juniors applying for transfer admissions and, even if they are, those schools wouldn’t be viable for me (e.g., UVA and Umich as an OOS student, etc). YPS are unique in that they rep the small group of IB target schools that do allow for such late transfers, albeit rare.

Can you explain what you mean here? I don’t understand what ‘they rep the small group of IB target schools that do allow for such late transfers’ means. If you had a source to link to that would be most helpful. Note that IB firms (including those not NYC based) hire students from dozens of different colleges every year.

You have been getting similar advice on your many transfer threads, but seem to not want to hear it. By all means apply to transfer, but no one here can handicap your chance of admission. Make sure you understand the transfer requirements and policies at your target schools…it seems Cornell was a bad transfer choice academically speaking because you weren’t accepted to the school with your major. Lastly, have your parents agreed to pay for a 5th year of college?

Good luck.

@CollegeSun:

I understand why you want to apply to these schools. I really do.

However you asked in your OP do we think it is worth the time and effort for you to apply. I don’t think it is worth it for those three schools, because I don’t see why they would accept you. I was just answering your question.

The fact that you would really like to attend one of them does not in my mind make you a more compelling candidate, to the point where they will accept you.

Go ahead apply, and if you get in any of them please post here about how I have no idea what I’m talking about. It would serve me right for answering a “chance me” thread.

As an alternative, I like @BarbaraCruse 's suggestion (#11), you may be able to implement some variant of that. You may dislike Ithaca in the winter, but it is wonderful there in the Spring and Summer. And IMO in the Fall too, perhaps most of all, but I don’t have SAD. Maybe you have enough credits left to do a Spring semester away? (probably not though, since you transferred in). They have that semester in Washington program, which IIRC is all Cornell credits, can you do that for the Spring semester?

@monydad Yes, I totally understand your perspective. After all, HYPS are like the hardest schools in the country to get into, even more so for transfer admissions. Thanks for being very candid and honest. I prefer honesty and practical criticisms much more than cliche advice such as “you never know so just apply”.

@monydad

It wasn’t a hail mary until around 2007.

Before 1990, Princeton accepted around 70 transfers a year. Before 2007, Harvard used to accept around 70-90 transfers a year. Stanford used to accept around 100-130 a year until 2007.

A friend who went to Harvard said that in his year, they had more than 80 transfers in the 1990s.

The experience I relayed in #10 was considerably before that. Though admittedly I have no idea how many transfers they took then.

Just because they took transfers does not mean they dug down to the applicants at schools 11-25 who just did "pretty well " there. They are HYPS. They think they are better. (Believe me when I say that, I worked with boatloads of these people at my I bank). They will accept some of those people who absolutely excelled at those schools into the club. Who showed that their school was too easy for them; held leadership positions as well. The best of the best. They were likely taking the 3.8-3/9 applicants from those schools, not the 3.5s. IMO.

Suggest look at some of the posts of @Hanna, herself a successful transfer student to Harvard, who should know, at least as of the time she was there.
eg:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/2803678#Comment_2803678 (post #6)

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/15894871#Comment_15894871 (post #2)

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/3437729#Comment_3437729 (post #7)

Number of transfers can typically be found on each school’s common data set, section D2.

Harvard (2018/19) accepted 15 of 1,548 transfer applicants. https://oir.harvard.edu/common-data-set

Princeton (18/19) accepted 13 of 1,429 https://ir.princeton.edu/other-university-data/common-data-set

Stanford (18/19) accepted 27 of 2,352 https://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/

Long odds obviously. Even more so when one realizes a not-insignificant proportion of accepted transfers are athletes or from community college or other schools that have an established relationship with these schools (like Deep Springs).

It’s certainly ok to apply, but balance the list with some more likely admissions if OP is certain they want to transfer.

@monydad

To be fair, you don’t even need an ivy league degree to work at an IBank.

At my I bank, we hire from most target schools in the US.

The only time prestige really matters is if you’re trying to get onto the buyside and even then, the bank you worked at matters more.

Although I suspect Goldman tends to like Harvard a lot but there are less ‘prestigious’ bulge brackets that don’t
care.

I can’t really see why the OP wants to go to Stanford etc. when he can get there from an easier school to get into.