Does the fact that you and your PI got this grant change anything about you wanting to transfer? I assume this grant isn’t going with you if you leave, is that correct?
I know you didn’t want to go into detail about why you’re transferring, but can you give a general idea? If I were an admissions officer and saw that you received a $100k grant at your current school, I would be questioning why you would want to leave.
Yes that was the paper, but it was in a public health field as opposed to this grant, which is in a different field.
When I posted that, I had already submitted the Grant, but didn’t bother listing it because I thought that there was no way in hell I’d get actually get it.
I did get rejected from both Stanford and Columbia freshman year, so i guess there’s that 
.
yes haha it’s very much changing my mind. My ultimate goals are an MD/PhD or a PhD. I just feel like it would be a big waste since I already poured a ton of hours practicing my writing (I started writing everyday since April), taking honors and graduate level classes, and writing my essays (which are 60-70% done).
I don’t know if anyone is in academia here, but do you think it’s possible for me to continue my research with my PI at a different university? Most of the work is computational and I’d be willing to fly down to Ann Arbor every month.
Maybe someone else will have a different POV, but these schools rejected you less than a year ago. Both of them. I can’t imagine that one semester at a new college will make difference….and that’s all you will have when you apply to transfer.
You are at an excellent research university.
YOU didn’t get the grant…you might have done a lot of the work to get it…but YOU didn’t actually receive $100,000….right.
I have another question - how will AOs know? Just realized that Grant recipients are not publicized
A quick call to your campus grants’ office will tell them all they need to know.
I guess you could say that. It’s probably my lab’s money, but it will be allocated to my project. I honestly have no idea how the financial side of this works - just the science 
.
Here’s the timeline of how it happened:
September / august: I joined the lab, picked up the project, realized that there was a different direction we could approach the problem from and found very successful preliminary results.
October / November: I refined my analysis. I wrote the letter of intent. I also created the figures. I ran most of my stuff through my PI first, and received a lot of feedback and edits. I won a much smaller university of Michigan grant award under my name and just heard back from the big grant on Friday.
Oh true
I just want to understand….you have two grants…one in your name (list that one) and another for $100,000 presumably to be used in your area…
And you want to transfer🤦🏻♀️?
So back to school choice. Is UM too big for you ?
Bcuz if it’s not and you are not considering ‘lesser’ mid size schools such as Rochester. Denver. Elon, UAH, etc this tells me you are pedigree hunting ….not unhappy ?
Is this correct ?
In that case you’re throwing away all the good you’ve accomplished and would be starting from square one. And have to re-establish yourself and you may not be able to.
To risk leaving when you’ll likely get rejected may set u back? And who will write your transfer letters of rec.
Do u know do these schools prefer 2nd or 3rd year transfers? Stanford accepted 55 of 3265 applicants. I couldn’t find Columbias data.
It’s an awful lot of risk. Besides pedigree is there a reason ??
I agree with all of the posters here.
You are starting to burn bridges. You need to be transparent.
You’ve already been denied by Stanford and Columbia and don’t seem to understand that changing your immigrant status isn’t going to get you into a better position for admission to those schools.
Your postings seem to lead to the fact that you ARE prestige-hunting. The elites can smell this a mile away. They will ask the same question: Why is he transferring? (You are avoiding the question here, otherwise your response would be transparent.)
If we are all seeing it, then you can bet that the admissions “radar” will spike with your need to reapply and get a “name” on your resume.
You didn’t like being rejected, and you didn’t accept that these tough schools rejected you. Your attempts to transfer now says that the committee was wrong and that you know better. Doesn’t sound very “Cardinal” to me.
I’m not clear what you mean by this. What does practicing writing and taking honors/grad classes have to do with transferring? Wouldn’t you have been doing this anyway? Can you give a general idea of why you want to transfer?
In April 2021 you were still in high school, weren’t you? You started your transfer applications before you graduated? How are you taking graduate classes as a second semester freshman?
You want to do a PhD or MD/PhD? then you are looking at a career in research. You are at the very beginning of making a reputation. Don’t start by doing anything less than 100% honorable. It’s a much smaller world than you realize.
You mean transfer to another university and fly back to your old one once a month from one of the coasts? NO. You may be believing that it is “your” grant- but it is not. It belongs to the PI and by extension to the university. That you did 90% of the work is 100% irrelevant- and a fact that you need to get used to if you are going to build a career in research.
Think of PIs as the conductor of the orchestra, and you as player. You have done really well to get your seat, but you are at best in the second row of the violin section. If you leave, somebody else will do the work (and they will find somebody, even if they have to borrow them from another department).
From your posts you are still smarting over your rejections from last year, and just accepted UMi as a stop-gap, planning to transfer before you even started. Do what you need to do but 1) be honest with your PI from right now- they have a legitimate expectation that you are on-board for this project and 2) if your PI is not writing an LOR do not claim the grant.
because i took up to biochemistry in high school and am enrolling in graduate level cell bio courses. I didn’t start my transfer apps until maybe october, but I began refining my writing skills because I knew that was a big weakness of mine in freshman apps.
Sound advice from lots of folks. Same things I would tell my kid.
But…
You are an earner, which is hardest thing to do. Keep on bringing
in the money and people will love you more. Good luck!
Once you have a graduate degree, no one is going to care where your undergrad was.
Since you didn’t get in to the schools you’re hoping to transfer to, that suggests that while you seem to be a rock star at Michigan, you’d be a pretty run of the mill student at your first choice schools.
Which of those is more likely to get you into the grad school of your choice?
You can mention that you helped write a proposal that resulted in a $100K grant for PI X. You CANNOT write that you won a grant. Even a grad student or a post doc who helped write grant for a professor should not claim to win a grant in their resumes or they would be viewed negatively if it is found out that they were not the PI.
Thank you. I think this is the best suggestion yet. I think I’ll apply using that phrasing
Certainly you’re under no obligation to, but you’ve yet to articulate a single reason why you need to leave Michigan.
I see reasons you shouldn’t leave:
You started something and you didn’t finish.
If you’re the rock star you claim you are, you’ll have a great relationship with your prof.
The academic world is small - if you’re in the same discipline at the other schools (if you even get in), your profs will know one another - and unless you can articulate a true reason to leave - your old prof isn’t likely going to have great things to say about you to the new profs…especially if you just walk out on him.
But why are you trying to leave?
Since you mentioned only two schools you could leave for - I have to assume you don’t actually need to leave.
What I see is a young person who is determined to do something without stepping back and looking at the potential consequences.
So you started writing essays - that doesn’t mean you have to follow through. If you apply and get turned down (98% likely based on stats not to mention they already turned you down) and the prof at Michigan finds out - and he needs to know - because you need to be transparent…depending on the prof you might be taking a dagger.
You need to step back, talk to an advisor, and get an objective POV.
Many “rock stars” ruin themselves by handling things the wrong way - and while we don’t have all the details, this is my fear here. Also, many “rock stars” in their mind actually aren’t “rock stars” - but that’s a hard concept for many to understand.
Good luck.
You cannot claim a grant that was not awarded to you. Even if your name was on the grant, there will be stipulations written in that says what happens if someone on the project leaves the university. As an undergraduate, you would not be able to take any part of the grant with you to another university, so walking away from your current school means you walk away from the grant. The only way this grant will benefit you is if you stay and work on the project and are listed as a co-author on a future paper once the work has been completed.
You need to speak with faculty members who are familiar with how the research world works before claiming credit for things like this. You can absolutely ruin your chances to get into other programs in the future if you make a misstep like this–not to mention, you need good references from faculty familiar with your abilities in the lab and it sounds like what you are doing now could burn some bridges with your current mentor.
Final word of advice: it is extremely difficult to get the kind of research experience that you are describing as an undergraduate. It typically only happens at less competitive schools that cannot fund postdocs and have limited graduate students to rely on. You are much better off staying put and continuing to gain research experience at your current school and leveraging that to go on to grad school elsewhere. Lab and research experience goes a long way for grad admissions and postdoc offers, and selective schools with top grad programs rarely offer undergrad research experience like you are describing.