The prompt asks what my reason is for transferring and what objective I want to achieve by doing so.
I don’t want to just say “Here is my reason bluh blub. And here is my objective.” I try to tell a story, so the admission guy who read it can know what my college lacks and why want to transfer.
MY ESSAY:
I remember throughout highschool, I used to be a kid who was satisfied with a good grade in class, but never made any attempt to make apply what I learn in class to the real world. More exactly, I was hoping that if I kept getting good grades in highschool and later in college, I would eventually make something people could use. But as soon as I got into college, courses got a lot harder and more theoretical. Yes, I know what I learned in my physics class could be applied to something some time later, but I was tired of having to wait to see what that ‘something’ is. I started an online course at Free Code Camp, to learn how to build the front end of a website. Although it had nothing to be with my major, I was excited that I would eventually be making something. I was eventually able to produce a very simple website hosted on GitHub, where I showcase my artworks.
The summer after highschool ended, I went to a meetup at Central Park where people would come to draw each other’s portrait, I signed up for it, and when it was time to compare our portraits, I was amazed by just how good some people’s artworks are and also appalled at how much mine fade in comparison. From then on, I worked hard on my drawing skills. Drawing was something I started doing all the way back when I was only six when my grandma bought me a book on how to draw stick figures. But in highschool, I basically stopped drawing on the pretext of my preoccupying schoolworks. I was forgetting who I was.
Fast forward to today, I am a Stony Brook student, three semesters in, and I am not happy. At Stony Brook, I grew tremendously, both in my work ethic and in finding out what I like to do. The more I stay here, the more I realize Stony Brook isn’t a good fit for me. For one, I love art, and like to spend my downtimes working on my comic book that I plan to publish through Amazon’s CreateSpace self-publishing service company. At Stony, I could not find other people who like to draw comic, or regularly spend their downtimes doing a pencil sketch. I couldn’t find any art club. The pervasive atmosphere I find on campus is a technical one, in which students are busy completing their computer science class assignments. But what I find most paradoxical about this technical atmosphere is that in actual engineering classes, no one shows their interest in the professor’s lecture.
In the first semester of my sophomore year, for example, I was in two engineering classes. In the first class, no one participated and I ascribe that to how easy the class was. But in the class, both my friend and I agree that the class was hard. In the second class, there could be no more than two students raising their hand per lecture, me usually being one of the two. Sometimes, the lecture got so confusing that I had too many questions all at once and didn’t know why I should I ask (there was enough time to ask all of them). The lack of participation and feedback from the student was a huge cause why the lecture material got so hard to understand; the professor didn’t know which topic posed the most difficulty for the student and needed reviewing, and when to slow down the pace of the lecture. The students simply didn’t care; at first, when the lecture was only slightly confusing, more students could have raised their hand and let the professor know their confusion, but they simply passed up the opportunities at that early stage; in the end, as the lecture material got harder, and the professor still went with his own pace, there were simply too many points of confusion in the material. At the end of one lecure near the end of the course, I asked my friend why he didn’t raise his hand, and he replied that he too was very confused but thought that if he went home and re-read the material, his confusion would go away. That probably was what most other students thought too, but the final average was a 55%. I got 100%, mostly thanks to my class participation.