<p>It seems like there are plenty of people who are rising college freshman but wish to transfer. I created this thread so people in a similar situation and convene and discuss the transfer process.</p>
<p>So, introduce yourself if you wish and feel free to ask questions!</p>
<p>College I'll be attending: State flagship
High School GPA: 3.1
ACT: 29
Colleges I wish to transfer to: Georgetown, NYU, and UVA</p>
<p>Hello.
I am a current rising freshman. </p>
<p>College I’ll be attending: Community college
High school GA 2.95
SAT: About a 1900
Colleges I wish to transfer to: Umass Amherst, Syracuse</p>
<p>Ideally I’ll be able to get into one of these for sophomore year as my stats aren’t TOO far off from being able to get into either. If i got into both, 99% chance I’d attend UMA unless the financial aid from Syracuse is something I can’t turn down.</p>
<p>Rising frehsman… </p>
<p>College: Umass Amherst (honors)
High school GPA: 4.15 (weighted and still rising :P)
SAT: superscore breakdown: CR: 760, writing: 740, math 650
Colleges to transfer into?
don’t know yet… Looking at possibly a small liberal arts college, however, I might apply to UChicago and MIT if I’m able to pull of a good (very good) GPA first semester next year.</p>
<p>I’m interested in physics or chem (or maybe pure math with a minor in comp sci) as opposed to engineering which explains why I’m looking into both tech schools and liberal arts. I’m just afraid I won’t know exactly what I want to major in in time. </p>
<p>Reason I want to transfer? My junior year stats really brought me down due what I would categorize as a period of depression. They don’t reflect who I am as a student. I barely passed AP calc AB or Latin 3. It’s a miracle my GPA is as high as it is. I was able to make up for my poor calc AB performance by taking BC calc this year. My high school required either calc AB or just calc A (first time this year) as a prerequisite for calc BC.</p>
<p>@powpowman As long as you can get a good GPA at your community college, you will definitely get into your schools of choice.</p>
<p>@iborpastan I can relate to your situation…I BOMBED my junior year. Otherwise, your high school stats are good. I think you can make it to MIT or UChicago with a high college GPA and good extracurricular activities. Do you know how much high school grades are taken into consideration in the transfer process?</p>
<p>I believe that for state schools, they are usually ignored, but for elite private schools, they definitely matter, at least a little bit. UChicago and MIT are well known for having incredibly difficult admissions, so it’s hard to imagine they won’t look at high school grades. </p>
<p>I have no idea to what degree they matter. I think it has a lot to do with context. The size of my improvement between junior year and the end of my freshman year in college will matter, however, I feel like my junior year will continue to hurt me because I don’t have any good reason to explain my grades. I had no life changing scenario during that particular year.</p>
<p>At this point, I highly doubt I will transfer. 
But I’m just posting here so I’ll have a way to easily access this page again in the future IF the need arises (and that’s a very big if).</p>
<p>College: McGill University (Canada)
High School GPA: 3.8 UW, 4.X W (unsure of weighted due to transferring high schools multiple times)
SAT I: 2350 (760 CR, 800 M, 790 W)
Transferring To: Unsure. It will completely depend on my college GPA. Even if I end up doing very well, it’s not very likely that I’ll be transferring, unless I encounter major issues during my college career. As a pre-frosh, there are already a number of aspects about McGill that I don’t like, but they’re not significant enough to make me consider transferring now.</p>
<p>So I just reread the last few posts in this thread, and would like to formally request admission to the “I Totally Failed Junior Year Club”. 
Well, it actually wasn’t much of a failure in my case (I still didn’t have anything lower than a B), but my grades that year were evenly split between A’s and B’s, as opposed to mostly A’s. That year was a really difficult period of time for me. I had just moved to a new high school and was living away from my immediate family with a couple of relatives. They worked long hours and were seldom home, and when they did get home, we didn’t see eye-to-eye on a number of issues (especially those pertaining to my education). 
</p>
<p>Also, it didn’t exactly help that I literally went through a period of depression that year, for the reasons I mentioned above and a number of others. I lost 5 pounds in just a couple of weeks because I refused to eat enough. My classes were not enjoyable (at that point, I hadn’t figured out exactly where my interests lay and didn’t know myself as a person that well either), so I had difficulty just getting up to go to school.</p>
<p>Then again, I did get this award after 11th grade for being in the (roughly) top 10% of my junior class for grades earned during that year. It was a highly competitive private school, and I thought that complaining about my situation would make me look like a whiner because it obviously wasn’t a total disaster. </p>
<p>But enough about me. How are you guys so certain that you’ll be wanting to transfer out of your current colleges? I know powpowman will be leaving his CC, but what about the rest of you? I’m fully willing to give McGill my best shot, and I’ll only consider transferring after I’ve put in all my effort but somehow don’t get the experiences I’m looking for.</p>
<p>^ You still managed really well. I like the school I’ll be attending, it’s just not the best school for my major. Ideally, I would like to be at Georgetown or GWU.</p>
<p>Don’t complain! haha. I know how you feel, though. I felt like that when the B’s started creeping in and then CARPLUNK!! It’s all relative. I wish i could complain JUST about B’s.
I personally wouldn’t qualify getting a little bit more in the way of B’s instead of A’s as a sign of depression. Junior year after all is the first year mots of us tend to load up on mostly AP classes and in your case, you changed schools, which is very stressful. I lot of us were stressed back then. </p>
<p>McGill is one of the top schools in the world, so if you do well there your first year, you probably won’t have trouble transferring.</p>
<p>Yeah… sorry. You’re right; I actually shouldn’t be complaining at all. Seeing your respective situations, it makes me sound like that annoying kid who whines about getting a 99% instead of a 100% on a test while you are fuming over your B/C and wishing you could smack him (me?) over the head. 
</p>
<p>But - the good news is that all of you survived! 
College acceptances and rejections at this point will no longer matter once you’ve done well enough to transfer to a more highly-ranked school. Life is going to be full of disappointments, but it’s the way you handle those disappointments that can literally either make or break you.</p>
<p>I guess I’ll elaborate on my situation.</p>
<p>I’ve always been a smart kid, but never had any motivation. In my middle school I didn’t need motivation for straight As. Straight As resulted in me getting into five different top public schools in my state. When I chose one I didn’t work any harder. It resulted in my gpa being low. this year I have a 3.6 gpa, and I think this momentum can bring me great success in community college next year, and then hopefully in university the next three</p>
<p>Also, I think what’s best for me is I realize everything that went wrong was 100 percentt my fault. I don’t blame my teachers, I don’t blame my mom, I don’t blame anyone other than myself. I had great teachers (which probably explains why it’s a top school), and a very large support system of family and friends.</p>
<p>@powpowman I totally understand what you mean! I was the smart kid for so long. I never had to do anything before high school. But I also handled high school pretty well for the first two years. However, I went to an OK high school, that really isn’t all that great save for a few good AP classes. I just got tired and maybe a bit distracted. It took me four years to realize high school is stupid and I shouldn’t have had any issues getting great grades. Most of the people in my high school are immature, feel entitled to their grades, and although I’ve always taken more difficult classes (I was part of a selective program within my high school, so I’ve tended to get the best teachers), I hear of people getting by with “honors” classes with barely doing any work. It’s just generally an apathetic environment that can drag anyone done. I think they also really need to make middle school more vigorous, but my views on what’s wrong with education are beside the point here. I don’t blame my teachers and parents either. I still visit two teachers that barely passed me last year and I consider them to be mentors. </p>
<p>@calgirl15. I don’t think you’re annoying. It’s always good to see people having high standards and trying to maximize their performance. Being an overachiever doesn’t make you annoying in my eyes, just committed.</p>
<p>So, in order of importance…
<p>Or is the admissions process more holistic?</p>
<p>@Rain- it reallly depends on the individual school.</p>
<p>I don’t want high school GPA to matter too much. I think I might get a B or B+ in the freshman chem II class I’m taking at UMass Lowell this semester as well as my calc BC class this quarter :(. I know, I’m being a stickler for grades right now :P. I’m not gonna stop working. Spending all summer catching up with academics by reading up on organic chemistry and going through a single variable analysis textbook! I want to be at my peak mental condition freshman year of college.</p>
<p>@ibor- I find it funny you’re transferring out of the school I want to go to lol. MIT is very difficult to get into, so you’re going to need to do a LOT to get in. But also remember to have fun. I’ve always been told people make a mistake by automatically assuming their school will be awful. Maybe you’ll fall in love.</p>
<p>I don’t think Umass Amherst is awful and I never said it was a bad school. I liked it more than I expected, it’s just that I don’t know yet if it’s the best fit, and frankly, I thought of it as a safety while I was applying. Knowing someone who got into MIT and Princeton who was also in MITES, I feel like they have it so good at some of the top schools. They get to learn from and meet leading experts in their respective fields (Yeah, I understand, many freshman classes are also taught by part time lecturers and grad students as well). That particular friend of mine goes to Princeton and he just posted a picture on facebook of himself standing next to John Nash. He had dinner with him and his wife yesterday. What an opportunity!! I visited MIT twice and I absolutely love the environment there. Yeah, I know MIT is incredibly difficult. And who says I won’t have fun? I’ll be careful to do everything in moderation.</p>
<p>The work is really difficult at MIT as well haha, I’m just not ready (yet) to handle it. Getting a 4.0 or a high 3 point something at Umass Amherst won’t be a cakewalk either. Especially since if I major in chemistry or chemical engineering, I’ll be taking organic chem next year. </p>
<p>I could do math problems this summer and actually become good at something I like but I just haven’t put enough effort in in previous years. I’ll have too much free time this summer so the only way I can burn myself out is if I decide to stay up late every night to do work as if I was back in school. </p>
<p>The first question on the MIT application is “what you do for fun.” I also have an art hobby I want to develop and I need to get back to playing piano as well as mountain biking.</p>
<p>I’m so happy to see so many other incoming college freshmen who are also interested in transferring I want to transfer because I feel like my last high school really screwed me over. I attended three high schools and the first two had reasonable grading (I received competitive GPAs in both of them) but the last school was a very competitive IB school that deflated grades. There are many brilliant students at my last school who I thought would be shoo-ins to top ivies but ended up getting rejected. So I hope to be able to transfer after freshman or sophomore year in college It’s all dependent on how much I like Berkeley though.</p>
<p>College I’ll be attending: UC Berkeley
High school GPA: 3.8 (with A LOT of B’s in junior year 
)
SAT/ACT: 2250/33
Colleges I wish to transfer to: Georgetown (if I’m not admitted off the wait list this year which it seems like I won’t be :/), UPenn, Stanford, Yale</p>
<p>Hmm… comparatively poorer junior years seem to be a trend here. x.sunny, I hope you get into Georgetown! I was waitlisted by Duke and Dartmouth this year but decided not to stay on either waitlist.</p>