<p>For freshman admission to UT, your high school grades and rank are important, and relatively few international students are admitted, so it will be hard for you to get in as a freshman. Consider starting elsewhere, put in a strong performance your first year of college, and then transfer to UT. If you were to start out at the University of Texas at Arlington, you would only be about three hours away from Austin, and all of the classes you took would transfer to UT, so you would not lose any time.</p>
<p>Also, if you had trouble transferring, UTArlington has a nice mechanical engineering program so you could finish your degree there if necessary [UT</a> Arlington Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dept.](<a href=“http://www-mae.uta.edu/]UT”>http://www-mae.uta.edu/)</p>
<p>There are a lot of other colleges you could transfer in from, too, of course.</p>
<p>And remember, there is always the option of going to UT for grad school</p>
<p>MidwestMom has a good point of transferring to UT Arlington. I would either pick that or a community college nearby. It’s all about planning now: look at the courses you want to take and see if all of them are transferred from a community college to the UT Austin. Pin Point the Courses, read over the prerequisites and meet an adviser, or give them a call or an email to the prospective college or University to make sure those courses are offered and if you need any prerequisites (just to make sure b/c catalogs and websites are not always right and/or updated). Reason I recommend community college is because its easier to get a higher GPA and it costs less. And when i spoke with a admissions committee member, he said that it doesn’t make a difference if you are transferring from a 2 year community college or a 4 year University,unless the University is some Ivy League university or those top 10/20 ones, which I don’t think is your case. To see which courses will transfer from College to College or University to University, you can go to this link [Texas</a> Common Course Numbering System On-Line Matrix](<a href=“http://www.tccns.org/tccns/default.asp?DB=2006&mode=Compare]Texas”>http://www.tccns.org/tccns/default.asp?DB=2006&mode=Compare) and compare the two Universities/colleges. It’ll tell you which courses you take at one college transfer to another.
In summary, Target your classes (plan at least two years roughly), look at the prerequisites, look if they transfer, look at tuition/cost of College/Uni, and get the highest GPA once you start attending. I was accepted to McCombs Business at UT with a 3.87 (lucky) and I’ve heard engineering school is almost as tough (its ranked high), so get the Highest GPA possible. By the way, when you transfer, they don’t give much significance to your high school scores or grades before 12th. I was a B student in high school (some A’s) and also flunked some classes with horrible GPA, BUT WHAT GOT ME IN was a high GPA + 1 Good Recommendation + Excellent Resume (email me if u need help with that) + Mild essays (not so superb). Hope you good luck man.</p>