Committing to a safety vs. trying again

Hi everyone! Longtime listener, first-time caller here. So I’m a community college student, and last year I applied to transfer for this fall. I was a distance learner and ended up with a 3.3 after my two years there. I’m learning-disabled and I wasn’t diagnosed till my late teens (22 now) so my current GPA is the highest one I’ve ever had.

However, I didn’t plan out my transfer path as thoroughly as I should have, or pick a list of four-years very well. Obviously 3.3 is a good GPA but it’s not Great, and my highschool transcripts are god-awful — I almost flunked out completely. And, well, you already know where this is going: I was rejected literally everywhere except my two backups. Surprise. /s

My backups are good schools and I definitely don’t HATE them, but I don’t know if I like either of them enough to spend ≈3.5 years there. Especially because 1) I’ve never visited due to COVID, and 2) they were my only acceptances. So I feel kind of backed into a corner and forced to say yes.

My only other option would be to take more summer and fall classes at my area community college and try the application process again. I’d be getting help with the transfer department and Disability Services there, and they have an honors program as well. Is it dumb to take more junior classes when I have two offers to a four-year already? What do you think?

Well, what are your goals in life and how would your options help you reach your goals? How would any other colleges be better?

4 Likes

What were the two backups?

2 Likes

Safeties should be schools that you could see yourself attending. So you should have known that up front - so I say you go.

Besides, we all do our best to pick the right school but you get there and who knows. Have a bad roomie or bad prof? On the other hand, go to a school your’re not excited about and maybe you meet your best friend.

Pick the safety - you knew it was a possiblity. Get jacked for it. Get involved…and it’ll work out just fine.

3 Likes

Do you want to go the traditional residential college route? If so, sure, attend your safeties. Make sure to register with the Office of Disabilities with documentation.

However there are many ways to finish college. Two of mine did traditional college but my third is in an adult learner/degree completion/continuing education program and works while taking one or two classes. This kid will graduate this year at 29 and has a good deal of work experience as well.

There are many online and low-residence programs and many schools have programs for non-traditional students. You can start off an unmatriculated, and then if you do well, apply for admission.

1 Like

Go to the school you like best. Continue your upward trend and make yourself stand out at college. In your case, I’m not seeing that you will get dramatically different results by continuing to improve the GPA and trying again. And be aware that some colleges might not give you that credit fo the extra courses. I don’t think there’s enough benefit to your plan to make a big difference in where you’d get accepted by waiting. You’ll have to spend more money at the CC.

2 Likes

@archivette: Remember the phrase: Garbage in, garbage out ?

Simply stated, you have not shared enough information about yourself, your goals, and the schools in question in order to generate reasonable recommendations.

1 Like

What’s your current GPA?
What do you want to study?
What colleges were you hoping for and what colleges did you get into?
What are your professional goals?
What are your cost constraints - are the 4-year colleges affordable without debt?

sorry, i forgot to include this in my op!!

  • my current gpa is 3.34.
  • i want to study art history or regular history.
  • my first choice was smith; i also applied to wellesley, mount holyoke, umass amherst, bu, bc, simmons, cedar crest, and northeastern. i only got into simmons and cedar crest, got rejected everywhere else.
    *i want to be a women’s history archivist/historian (herstorian?)
    *simmons offered me a deans scholarship and i’m still waiting to hear back from cedar crest as i had a mix-up with submitting my tax info. so hopefully yes? but i also plan to get a job while i’m at school like i’ve been doing so far so that should help as well.

If the CC you commute to is affordable without any debt, I’d be tempted to say to stay at the CC and take summer and Fall classes, get straight A’s to increase your GPA, and start or continue working on being a public historian (with covid, if you can’t find stuff to hear and record and collect, then your calling isn’t that strong :p) + find a museum where you can be a volunteer docent.
What foreign language are you currently taking? For graduate school in history, French would be expected but for public history a language other than English spoken where you live (Spanish, Portuguese, Creole, Arabic, etc.) would be more useful.

1 Like

yes it is affordable without debt! i volunteer at a Big Name Museum in my area w their library’s reference desk, and i should be starting a receptionist job at a local historical society soon (fingers crossed and all that!!)

as for foreign languages, tha mi gàidhlig agam is tà gaeilge agam, et je parle un peu de francais! i’m taking each course through a combination of duolingo, mangolanguages and Regular Old Textbooks. i surprised myself w how invested i got, i was never very good at french when i took it at school. i actually hope to do an Actual Library Project about scots gaelic and french’s impact on canadian culture one day.

1 Like

that’s awesome!!! congratulations to your kid, they’re SMASHING it

i want to be a women’s history archivist/historian. simmons has a killer MLIS degree (my top choice for it actually) but i never considered it for undergraduate too because i’m given to understand it’s not great to get two degrees from the same institution.

since i want to specialise in women’s history, i currently volunteer with an art museum library. the library staff is all-female, and they’re also doing an initiative to represent women in art history! so suffice it to say, going to a women’s college is really important to me.

smith was my first choice because 1. it has an archives concentration, which i couldn’t find anywhere else, and 2. it has a HUGE women’s history archive. i know being an archivist is a demanding job, so i was really excited to get that hands-on experience early (and was subsequently crushed when it was my first rejection of many.)

cedar crest college and simmons university, my two acceptances, are both women’s colleges, so i’m glad that worked out. however, they seem to be geared really heavily towards nursing, social work and the Hard Sciences like biochemistry. they definitely Have history and art history departments, but i can’t find as many Glowing Testimonials for them as i can for the science stuff. i know that’s not necessarily an indicator of how good their humanities are but it sure does feel like one, haha.

i was also looking for really good libraries and special collections, and i found cedar crest and simmons to be lacking in those too. (at least compared to the one at my volunteer work and the ones at other schools i applied to.) cedar crest is outside philadelphia, which has plenty of museums and libraries, and simmons is Literally right next to the mfa boston and isabella stewart gardner museum. which is great and wouldn’t be the end of the world, but not much different than my current volunteer work either. i already Make The Trek Into The City to look at an archive every week, and i was really looking forward to having one At My Disposal instead.

Excellent. See if you can take formal language classes and continue everything else.
Do very well for 2 more semesters at your CC, see what else you can do, and try again at ith and other colleges with more soecialized majors and archives (one od the remaining 7-sisters would be a must due to their history and thus archives).

1 Like

you’re absolutely right. safeties are a good thing and they SHOULD be schools you can see yourself attending; i know that now. i did not, however, when i began my transfer process.

cedar crest and simmons are Good Schools and i don’t hate them. but since they were my only acceptances, they kind of feel more like The Only Way Out instead of…well, a safety net. something you’re supposed to feel relieved about. i know it’s my own fault; because i didn’t plan well enough. i just feel like if i tried again, with Actual Planning behind me, they WOULD feel like safeties, you know? even if i ended up with only their acceptances again, i’d feel a lot better about it because i was more prepared.

by the way, what was the transition like for your child? what was the Learning Curve like?

Simmons really doesn’t sound like such a bad option. In addition to the museum proximity, there’s the cross-registration at MassArt and SMFA - seems like there should be a lot of opportunities there, and access to special collections beyond what’s specifically at Simmons. I understand how you wanted to diversify, but I’m not sure that’s a reason to turn Simmons down if it works financially. How do your costs at Simmons, with the scholarship, compare with what Smith would cost based on the NPC? Also, check out Simmons’ study abroad opportunities and see whether there’s anything there that would sweeten the deal sufficiently to make it add up for you.

If you had a strong year academically this year, such that your application in the fall would be stronger than this year’s application was, then going for another application cycle could make sense; it sounds like you have a lot of worthwhile things that you can keep working on.

3 Likes

I’m not even sure why the “college list” is so relevant. All you need is one affordable school. That’s what I did. I did one college application, got accepted, and never looked back. The more classes you take at community college, the more money is wasted on classes that aren’t applicable to your major.

1 Like

i’m glad that approach worked out for you. however, i am looking to specialise in major and extracurriculars, which is why choosing from a list is important to me. what’s confusing you?

That major is particular enough that the strongest possible college with the most reach/influence and resources would make a meaningful difference in post-graduation outcomes.