<p>Now, I understand this is incredibly preemptive. Because I haven't even started college yet. I will be starting at Stony Brook University on Long Island in a few weeks, but have this desire to get into Harvard. My grades in high school were great, but not top notch. I plan to do incredibly well at SB. I will also be increasing my knowledge outside of school, by reading insatiably (as I have been doing for the past few months). I speak and understand German (I taught myself in about a year's time). I plan to study Latin next, and then I suppose it'll be onto the three major Romance languages. After that, I'm not sure, but I want to learn as many languages as possible. I'm very interested in linguistics.
I want to be a college professor of history. I love history ardently, so I figure I'd enjoy that. I did, however, get an 1850 on my SAT. I know, that won't work for Harvard at all.
If I do incredibly well at SB, and distinguish myself by knowing several languages and having a certain esoteric knowledge, have great extracurriculars, is it possible that, a year or two down the line, I could transfer to Harvard for my undergraduate program?</p>
<p>Depends on your SB GPA. Plus think about this, do you think you’ll be able to handle the work load at Harvard? The reason students get rejected with low SAT scores is because the admission officers know that they will struggle. So think about that before you decide to apply.</p>
<p>Assume it’s a 4.0.</p>
<p>Well, at least you said Harvard instead of Princeton.</p>
<p>Now, I get a turn to be preemptive. Your post utterly insults of plenty of other transfer applicants who realize how impossible transferring into Harvard is, and settle for lesser ranked schools. Imagine the perfect applicant. His ethnicity is of the most underrepresented minority. He has attended MIT with a perfect 4.0 GPA for three semesters, taking impossible courses such as Calculus 4 and M-Theory. His SAT score is 2400, and he has taken 6 subject tests, scoring 800 on all of them. He went to the most rigorous high school in his state and graduated valedictorian. He has worked as a Google intern under Sergey Brin himself. He decides he wants to transfer into Harvard and files the transfer application.</p>
<p>Then, he receives a response from Harvard. He is on the waitlist. Why? Because his extracurriculars were lacking. Yeah, he spent all his time doing the hardest work imaginable, which led to little free time. One super-stellar internship was all he could manage.</p>
<p>Harvard’s transfer rate is 2%. I would guess many of the few who succeed have extremely powerful social connections. Maybe their mother is a dean at Harvard. Or their father is the CEO of Oracle.</p>
<p>Please, take a look at yourself and face reality. Someone else will definitely come and criticize me for blowing things out of proportion, but they will agree with the main idea. Your “desire” to go to Harvard is shared by just about every serious college applicant, yet they have specific, compelling, and genuine reasons to transfer. You think of your own college as a stepping stone to greatness, but you have yet to even experience one semester of college and see whether Stony Brook might be a better school for you than Harvard. Your post is more than preemptive. It’s infinitely naive.</p>
<p>The people who have succeeded in transferring to Harvard can tell you their end of the story. Everyone has a chance, even you. Then again, everyone has a chance of winning the lottery, should they try.</p>
<p>No one from College Confidential has posted in a results thread stating that they were accepted into Harvard has a transfer IIRC. </p>
<p>As for as your chances… don’t count on it. Even if you do all of the things you state in the OP, that means you probably will have zero extracurriculars, killing any chance you might have had at Harvard. If you really want to be a professor you should know your undergrad is irrelevant. Do all the things you state in the OP, get a 4.0 and end up being a PhD candidate at Princeton or something (which is better than Harvard for history AFAIK)</p>
<p>Harsh…</p>
<p>If you listen carefully to what Harvard admissions officers talk about in respect of transfers, they are really looking for that community college late-bloomer gem with a “story.” Think , “from homeless to Harvard.” They really don’t think much of transfers from colleges that can basically serve all your needs. Your best bet, in these circumstances, is not to add more courses and “stuff,” but to find some aspect of history that is unique and covered only by one or two Harvard professors. Write a paper that shows your incredible insight into that part of history, send it to those professors, and request/offer your special research skills and sources to support their unique research. If you get the Harvard professor on your side and he/she is the one writing your rec, you might just have a chance. Either that, or become some incredible athlete quickly – that trumps everything. Become a record holder in swimming or lacrosse or squash. Harvard loves those sports and will cut you some slack.</p>
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<p>This is my main problem, we can all ASSUME ANYTHING, but it MEANS NOTHING. Don’t waste your time, ‘planning’ what you want to do two years down the line. Instead, work on what you need to do today and then assess your situation when the time comes.</p>
<p>There are many highly regarded, rather selective LACs and leading state universities that will gladly take a 4.0 transfer student. Those are the universities you should be researching if you are looking to make a “step up” the college ladder. Harvard, Stanford and the likes are just lotto tickets because the transfer rates are so extremely low and one needs a mind-blowing hook to even be considered (and a 4.0 is not it). However, if you look the next layer or two down from them, many options start to open up, especially if you are able to pay full ticket price.</p>
<p>By the way, Harvard accepted 1% this year. They wanted a transfer class of 12 (so probably accepted 13) out of 1500 applicants. </p>
<p>And, though they can’t give out athletic scholarships, they do take transfer athletes (who are a shoe-in). </p>
<p>So it dwindles down to around a 0%.</p>
<p>You guys are all being melodramatic. Transferring into Harvard isn’t impossible.</p>
<p>@olvbabshe It’s too bad that everyone thinks it isn’t impossible. Life is melodramatic. Get used to it. If the OP wants to try to transfer into Harvard, let him do it. He’ll just be forking over free cash to the school anyway as registration fee.</p>
<p>I believe there was one kid on CC who made it into Harvard as a transfer from Vanderbilt iirc - he was quite extraordinary though. </p>
<p>It’s not impossible, just extremely unlikely. I’d wait a year and then try for schools like Columbia, Penn, or Cornell. You must realize that these schools are extremely difficult to enter as well, and that you should not expect to get in.</p>
<p>Think of it this way: if you’re planning to transfer into a school from a college, then you probably would have had to have been accepted by that school back in senior year. Moreover, transfer spots available for a given school are largely determined by the number of students who actually leave the school, so if nobody leaves for whatever reason, you won’t have a chance at all. Look at Carnegie Mellon’s school of business, for instance.</p>
<p>^^Yes, You are a shoe-in, if you are a Nobel Price Winner. Maybe work on the Peace Award?^^</p>
<p>Here is what you can do, go to China and lobby for Human Rights? Or stop the Syria Massacre?^^</p>
<p>The SAT will still matter. You need to raise it several Hundred poiints for starters.</p>
<p>Damn you people are so harsh but they are all right. Transferring to Harvard IS practically impossible. They only took I believe 12 people out of 1500 applicants. However, you can basically get the same education without all the stress by applying to the other Ivy League schools. Who knows, you may find that you love these schools even more? Harvard isn’t everything. Once your in the Ivy Leagues, whichever of them, you can bet that you will have garnered a great education and established a reliable alumni network. Good luck, I wish you the best.</p>
<p>Agreed with Cordova1992. Best focus your efforts on something else because whatever concerns and stress you have about transferring to Harvard just aren’t worth it.</p>
<p>Maurik, ignore the cynics. It’s definitely possible to beat a 1-2% admissions rate. </p>
<p>But first, to address the original post: my friend was accepted to Yale as a sophomore transfer applicant (Yale has a 2% admissions rate, for anyone who’s counting) with a high school SAT score of 2100. That’s relatively low. I’d wager that other matriculants were accepted with even lower scores.</p>
<p>He didn’t retake, and he still got in. Conclude from that what you will. A higher score obviously wouldn’t hurt you, but I’d say one low score ALONE wouldn’t disqualify you (and a higher score ALONE wouldn’t make the difference between admission and rejection). Your application is considered in its totality. Retake the SAT if you’d like, but keep the opportunity cost in mind.</p>
<p>And now let’s address some of the ridiculous stuff that’s been posted in this thread. There’s gonna be a lot of Yale talk (just to clarify: I was accepted as a junior transfer applicant at Yale University during the 2011-2012 admissions cycle, beating a 2% acceptance rate), so gird your loins. (Harvard sucks, by the way. Apply to Yale instead!)</p>
<p>“Harvard’s transfer rate is 2%. I would guess many of the few who succeed have extremely powerful social connections. Maybe their mother is a dean at Harvard. Or their father is the CEO of Oracle.” (justanothertrans)</p>
<p>Beating 2% odds doesn’t require “powerful social connections” or any other (hilariously) quasi-conspiratorial explanation. For instance, none of this year’s 22 Yale transfer matriculants (of 24 transfer acceptances) were sons of CEOs or deans. I doubt many (if any) of Harvard’s transfer matriculants were, either.</p>
<p>“Even if you do all of the things you state in the OP, that means you probably will have zero extracurriculars.” (majoreco)</p>
<p>You think maintaining a 4.0, learning several languages, and having good extracurriculars are all mutually exclusive? Hardly. If anything, a good applicant would interrelate all three goals.</p>
<p>“Your best bet, in these circumstances, is not to add more courses and ‘stuff,’ but to find some aspect of history that is unique and covered only by one or two Harvard professors. Write a paper that shows your incredible insight into that part of history, send it to those professors, and request/offer your special research skills and sources to support their unique research. If you get the Harvard professor on your side and he/she is the one writing your rec, you might just have a chance.” (placido240)</p>
<p>This is particularly bad advice. Sure, if you manage to pull it off, you’ve got a pretty good shot, but it’s an unnecessarily lofty goal. Normal people with normal “stories” get in every year.</p>
<p>“Harvard, Stanford and the likes are just lotto tickets because the transfer rates are so extremely low and one needs a mind-blowing hook to even be considered (and a 4.0 is not it).” (annikasorrensen)</p>
<p>This is wrong. I beat 2% odds (transfer acceptances to Yale and Stanford, for instance), and I didn’t have a “mind-blowing” hook. A bunch of my friends beat 2% odds (transfer acceptances to Yale), and they didn’t have “mind-blowing” hooks. In fact, a lot of them had relatively low SAT scores or mediocre high school GPAs. But the numbers are only one part of your candidacy – and they’re definitely not looking for robot candidates who only churn out perfect SAT scores. (If anything, they’ll go out of their way to reject 'em. Seriously. THOSE people are boring as ****.) They really do consider your application in its entirety. No mind-blowing hooks necessary.</p>
<p>So while there’s obviously an element of chance involved during every transfer admissions cycle at every school, any comparison to the lottery is intellectually dishonest.</p>
<p>“He’ll just be forking over free cash to the school anyway as registration fee.” (altruition)</p>
<p>What an immature and unnecessarily mean oversimplification! And by the way, Harvard (and Yale, and Stanford, and eleven other schools) granted me a waiver of their application fee, and all they wanted was a letter explaining my financial situation. Just a helpful tip!</p>
<p>“Think of it this way: if you’re planning to transfer into a school from a college, then you probably would have had to have been accepted by that school back in senior year.” (altruition)</p>
<p>This is demonstrably false. I personally was accepted by Stanford as a transfer applicant but rejected as a high school applicant. This is true for many other applicants at many other schools during many other admissions cycles.</p>
<p>And finally, for some really, really good advice:</p>
<p>“We can all ASSUME ANYTHING, but it MEANS NOTHING. Don’t waste your time, ‘planning’ what you want to do two years down the line. Instead, work on what you need to do today and then assess your situation when the time comes.” (entomom)</p>
<p>This is what you should take from this thread. Entomom is 100% right. (She usually is!) You actually need to spend some time at Stony Brook before you can assess your odds and figure out where you stand. I personally didn’t consider transferring until after the summer of my freshman year. </p>
<p>In the meantime, keep your GPA as high as possible, do what you love, learn as much as you can, go to lots of parties (really!), make tons of new friends, forget about transferring, and in a year or so decide whether you still want to apply to Harvard (or Yale cough cough seriously Harvard sucks). If you don’t, then I can promise you’ll regret it, and by then you could have plenty of legitimate reasons not to transfer.</p>
<p>But “hurr durr, a 1-2% acceptance rate means you’re just throwing away your money” is a terrible reason not to apply. Take that piece of advice from an aggressively “normal” person who wouldn’t have gotten in at his dream school if he had listened to these idiots.</p>
<p>Edit: Feel free to PM me with any other questions if you want to avoid the nattering nabobs of negativism (hat tip to Spiro T. Agnew).</p>
<p>if you add 500 points to your SAT, keep a 3.85-4.0, do something remarkable and then write a convincing essay u’ll have a 1-1.5% chance</p>