Hi all, this will be a long block of text. I apologize, and please bear with me.
I’m in my spring semester of freshman year in LSP at NYU and I’ve decided that I definitely want to go forward with transferring to another school. I originally applied ED I because I fell in love with “having the city as your campus” and the opportunities it could bring… and it turns out that the school itself just wasn’t a fit for me.
Some of it may just be me, but I feel that the social scene, for me at least, is very shallow and expensive, and it has been hard to make friends (I basically hang around the same group every weekend), considering the fact that there is next to no school spirit at this university (which is understandable since there is no sports, good campus events to really bond around). The program I am studying in doesn’t fit me; as someone who knows what they want to study already, it is too overbearing with extraneous requirements and hinders me from getting to my major. I also realized that my personality is not very compatible with people in the clubs that I want to be involved in; our vision conflicts.
Unfortunately, New York to me now seems like a cold and impersonal city. I literally feel like that I’m not in college; that I just live in NYC and happen to take classes here. I have the rest of my life to live here if I wanted to, but I will never get that traditional college experience back. I also realize that it is not necessary for me to study here since I am strongly considering working in politics in Washington DC as my career choice.
tl;dr I dislike NYU’s atmosphere and the program I’m in, and it makes no sense for me to be there. NYU feels like it’s run too much like a business and it doesn’t work for me. I absolutely cannot justify paying $70k a year to study here when I can easily take $40k OOS at UNC or $50k OOS at UMich, as a couple of examples, and have a better “traditional” college experience.
College Stats:
GPA: 3.575 through 16 credits and whatever I receive this semester (I’ll probably have to stay another year barring me getting any applications done before March 1, so my main goal will be to raise this)
EC’s: NYU Public Policy Symposium, Policy Case Competition, College Republicans, Aviation Club (will probably join more clubs too)
High School Stats:
GPA: 3.65 (7 APs)
ACT: 32
EC’s: Debate Team (Congressional Debate), Young Republicans, volunteered in a biochemistry and molecular biology lab at my local hospital, worked on multiple political campaigns including a winning US Congress campaign and a presidential primary campaign
Therefore, I’m trying to look at colleges that have at least 2 of these 3 criteria and that I have a shot at : good school spirit, strong economics/government programs, or proximity to DC. This is my preliminary list:
Georgetown University
George Washington University
American University
University of Maryland- College Park
University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill
University of Michigan?
University of Virginia
This is just a temporary list, so please feel free to give me advice on what I can improve on / my chances/ add any schools that may be a good fit for me. I’m pretty set on exploring my options (basically having one foot out the door already).
Cheers!