HI, I was offered a GT from ILR. I was wondering if transfer students feel welcome at Cornell. As time went on, did you guys see yourselves as Cornell students rather than transfers who didn’t belong? Does Cornell feel like home to you?
Well, I’m an alumnus who did GT, so I can only speak to my experience. I did find, initially, I felt like an outsider because cliques are naturally established in the first year, so there was a collective experience I was not a part of and transfers tended to stick together as outsiders looking in - at least for a while.
That said, knowing a lot of transfer students I realized they tended to fall into two broad categories, with exceptions, of course: really smart students from financially strapped backgrounds and not as smart students with quasi wealthy parents.
I think guaranteed transfer has a lot more to do with budgeting than the school would admit. They want the smart, broke kids as alumni but don’t want to float them financially for all four or more years, and they want the slower, wealthier kids’ access to big donation money but don’t want to risk them failing out in the less mature / more chaotic beginning of college.
What put my mind at ease was integrating into the classes and realizing I’m not actually less capable or intelligent than any of the other students (granted, I was on the smart kid / broke family side of the equation).
On the up side, I realized there was a bit of a bubble mindset on campus. The 4-year students only knew Cornell as a college experience and we transfers had something to compare / contrast it against, which gave me an unexpected sense of quasi world-weariness relative to the students who were constantly wondering how they stacked up with other schools and fixated on defining themselves by a school rather than as individuals experiencing a school.
I remember dating one girl who had some minor issue with transfers because she felt like the 4-year students had been through an experience together that we didn’t share (or perhaps we didn’t earn in her mind, even though we were accepted out of high school just like them), but that’s silly in a school as wildly diverse as Cornell where there’s very few truly “shared experiences” between everyone.
In the end, no one ever gave me grief for it then and no one cares now. It really never comes up and I’m as proud an alum as anyone else out there, shedding a tear with everyone else whenever I stumbled upon the This Is video.
Hey applejack! I just wanted to say thanks for the incredibly informative posts you, Figgy, diehldun, indigo, and many other GT’s had way back in '07-08. I’m a GT as well and don’t think I would’ve felt nearly as comfortable with the entire process if it weren’t for you guys and the resources you provided.
And this is a great question—I’ll get back to you all in a couple of months and let you know how my first year on campus is going, haha.
@applejack, are you implying that Cornell is not need blind like they claim to be?
S1 is a graduating senior as was a transfer (not GT). His first semester on campus he went Greek and gave him an instant community. He did say that the other AEM students were closer together as freshman year they did team building and projects, but by the end of the year there was no difference. By now, I am not sure that he or anyone else even remembers that he was a transfer. Good luck
The challenge for transfers is, the people who started there initially have already found their cohort. They aren’t typically as outgoing or eager to expand their social circles as newcomers are. This isn’t specific to Cornell, it’s normal human behavior. So initially your cohort is likely to be drawn from your fellow transfer students. Eventually, as you meet more people, you get integrated.
You can speed up your integration by joining something right away, like pledging per above, joining clubs, etc. Living with people in close quarters who are not exclusively transfers, in the right kind of housing situations, can help a lot. Besides frats, the coops, program houses, houses in Collegetown tend to be very social. Collegetown upperclassmen dorms, D2 found to be not so social (nice dorm rooms though).
D2 transferred in. Though not in either “broad category”. She wasn’t a GT, so I didn’t witness any concerns specific to that. She did have a period of adjustment initially, but ultimately it definitely felt like home to her. To the point where it then became her home. It was difficult to get her to leave, actually.
I’m not officially saying that. I’m just noting a strong correlation to high / low wealth in the sample size I observed.
(is that diplomatic enough?) 
They could very well do the acceptance need-blind, and then when sorting out the financial details shift some people to the transfer option. But, we all know famous young actors with lots of money don’t get accepted into Ivy League schools at incredibly high rates because of their brilliance. We also know at all of these schools legacy and wealthy donor admits are quite openly there to provide more resources to support less connected students.
Hi Coriander23 - Glad to hear. I don’t know what compelled me to check back in here after being away so long. I even had to track down both this password and the one for an email account I never use anymore, so it wasn’t easy.
I won’t be here much but hopefully a couple new posts will help a few more folks on the fence out like you were.
Enjoy your time there - I’m not going to b.s. you that it’s the best time of your life (that would be sad) but it is a really unique opportunity and place.
I don’t know about Cornell, but some schools are need blind only during early and regular admissions, but then become need aware for waitlisted students.
Just a couple of random comments.
25+ years out, I have only recently become aware that some women in my sorority were transfer students. The conversation arose b/c we are now sending our children off to college. I knew that some women pledged as sophomores, but I never gave their reasons any thought.
I would imagine (speculating here) that the freshmen right of passage present in certain majors/colleges could cause the transfers to feel they are not part of the group, but I think that disappears once the have been in class for a year. The class sizes become smaller, and everyone is not moving in lockstep together after sophomore year.
I never felt there was a FA distinction. I know of three students who will be starting as GTs this fall, and they are all full pay. The transfers I knew from my day were also full pay. Now, are the stats of the GTs slightly lower? Maybe, but just slightly. Or, were they applying for highly selective majors where there were only 50 spots available for non-hooked applicants?
Look at Dyson to see how much they grow the program after freshman year. Even though admissions are handled at the college level, the university caps the freshman class for each college.
I agree with @Renomamma that being full pay can be advantageous when hoping to move off the WL, but I do not know Cornell’s policy on FA & WL.
Not meaning to be the negative person, but D1, '10 G, said transfers were definitely looked down upon.
D1 is a very accepting person and was not a member of a sorority. (No disrespect for young women who join sororities) but she said that many thought transfers were of a lower intellectuall capacity, ie they struggled in classes and asked dumb questions.
Obviously this an extreme generalization, but D1 at the time said this is ( was now?) the reality.
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I am most familiar with transfers to CAS. I really don’t think the comments of #10 are “the reality” for transfers into CAS. D2 didn’t report having any issues with this, and I wouldn’t have expected her to. Back in the dark ages, I don’t recall any of us CAS students thinking ill of transfers into CAS. I assumed they must have knocked the proverbial cover off the ball at wherever they transfered from, and were fully qualified. Transfers were treated no differently than anyone else. The admit %s for CAS transfers is typically about the same, or less, than for freshman admits. No prospective CAS transfer should be concerned about this, IMO.
There have, however, been a handful of prior posts on CC by students expressing the viewpoint of # 10, in general. Upon follow-up, their complaints seemed to be focused particularly on community college transfers IIRC. CAS students (except maybe majors with cross-listed courses like bio) maybe won’t see so many of these people in the classroom, since they matriculate mostly to the contract colleges and have completed a lot of their “gen ed” courses before they arrive. I know I didn’t.
IIRC those Cornell students who posted complaints believed some of the community college students were not qualified for admission to Cornell out of high school, and did not really prove they were qualified by whatever they did in the shorter time at their community college, due to the weak cohorts they were competing against for grades there. To compound things, standardized test scores are not always submitted for transfer admissions.
Cornell has articulation agreements with a number of NYS community colleges. It is not clear whether it admits every student without constraint or if it has certain quotas to respect.
If you come in through an admissions process that the people already there might consider “easier”, or “suspect”, it should not be surprising if some subset of them who are inclined to draw distinctions initially has their suspicions about your relative academic prowess. The way to allay these suspicions is to kick butt there academically.
If you are all taking the same course, and they have a “B”, and you have an “A”, it will be difficult for them to maintain any preconceived opinions they may have. On the other hand, if you have a “D” then perhaps their preconceptions will be reinforced.
But I’ve no idea how prevalent that sentiment is. And anyway, after your initial term there nobody would even know you were originally a transfer student, unless you tell them.
Thanks for all your input everybody! @monydad @applejack @CT1417 @morrismm @Renomamma @3rdsontocollege
As someone transferring in from a community college, I can see how what #12 said might be true. I know of two other from my cc that applied to cornell and were accepted. It should be noted that we are a NY school with a transfer agreement. Although the agreement does not guarantee admittance, I’m aware of one admit that was far from qualified. They did poorly in many of their classes at cc, and I’m surprised as to how they were even accepted.
That being said, I feel as though there may be a sort of a jump in expectations that will catch a transfer off guards. Many of my professors warned me about the curriculum jump I’ll experience. Our school is very well ranked among cc’s, and can be compared to some of the state universities (depending on the major). So it wouldn’t surprise me if during their first semester there, some transfers did come off as unintelligent, or have yet to catch up with the classroom culture (in regards to which questions are appropriate for the professor). I figure if you can learn quickly how to not stand out in your classes for the wrong reasons, you should be fine.