I am a New York City resident currently attending a CC in the city. I am graduating this semester and am looking for school to transfer to. Before I attended this CC, I was an underachieving student who had average grades and average SAT scores. Somehow I gained admission to and attended a US News top 30 college. At this college, I was still very immature and didn’t take school seriously (the work wasn’t difficult, i just skipped class to hang out and other stuff) and was academically dismissed. After a year I went back to that school for a semester, getting B’s in the classes I took, but I knew I had to do some soul searching before I kept on with my college career. I left school and worked for a few years where I gained some clarity as to what I wanted to do.
At 26 years old, I decided to go back to school and enrolled in a CC where I currently have a 4.0 GPA and started up my own non-profit organization that has been very successful. Currently I am 27 years old in my last semester at this CC and was wondering what colleges would be off limits for me to transfer to. Yale is my top choice because of their statistics and data science program as well as the sports analytics group they have which are both two things that are hard to find in a college, and I know I can quality letters of rec, as well as have some solid essays, but will they deny me off the premise that I am too old or that I flunked my first college opportunity? Other college options are: Cornell, Columbia school of general studies, SUNY Binghamton, and Fordham.