<p>I'm a high school senior right now, so I might be jumping the gun a bit to start planning my future transfer, but I want to keep my options open. My question is whether or not high school records are really that important for the transfer app. </p>
<p>It's second semester, and I'm not too motivated to get A's anymore. I have a weighted 4.3 right now. Will it make much of a difference if I don't keep up stellar grades in this last semester?</p>
<p>I'll be at either UCLA or UCB next year. I know that the college grades are more important (or so I heard), but does that mean that your HS record doesn't matter so much? And how important are EC's?</p>
<p>I'm a student at Cal filing transfer apps right now. To answer your question, your high school grades matter considerably less after two years in college (junior transfer) and slightly less after just one (soph transfer). I would recommend that you keep up your grades -- particularly during second semester senior year -- because many other people won't be. Higher grades can't hurt. (Colleges use high school grades and SAT scores to predict college performance; if you maintain a high college GPA for three terms, your high school performance begins to matter less. This is, I suppose, why there are instances of people with <3.0 high school GPA's receiving admission to Brown and Dartmouth.)</p>
<p>In any case, I would recommend against coming to Cal or going to UCLA with the intention of transferring as doing so would adversely affect your social life. You will find yourself less inclined to forge relationships with other students (and vice versa) if you believe that you are leaving relatively soon... That said, if you are committed to transferring, you might want to look into another school at which to matriculate -- perhaps a lower-tier Ivy (Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell) -- if you receive admission. Very few people succeed in leaving Berkeley as far as I can tell.</p>
<p>I'm not sure that I'm going to transfer. I just want to make sure I don't screw myself over this semester, in case I do end up transferring later. The UC system is great and all, but I'd really like to go to a private school, pref. in the East.</p>
<p>My HS grades were pretty average for the very selective colleges, so I'm hoping a sem in college with good GPA will help my chances. And I guess I shouldn't completely slack off this sem then. </p>
<p>As for the social impact, I'm an extrovert and the thought of meeting two entirely new groups of people at different colleges is pretty exciting.</p>
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[quote]
Very few people succeed in leaving Berkeley as far as I can tell.
<p>I've known at least a half-dozen extremely qualified applicants who didn't get in anywhere as a transfer. (Granted, they were all applying to upper-tier Ivies and Stanford...) I would imagine that it's harder to convince adcoms at other universities that one really doesn't have the opportunities or the programs one seeks at giant schools like Cal or UCLA.</p>