<p>Hello guys, I am a community college student, planning to transfer to UCLA for mechanical engineering in fall 2013. I have recently immigrated to USA, and I started a job right after high school in my home country. I did well at my job and was promoted, and held that job for 3 years before coming to USA. I have 4.0 GPA in 22 units i took this spring. i am planning to take 10 more units in summer (I am rushing as I need to finish 60 units before fall 2013). I recently landed a job at Mathnasium working as a math tutor for about 13-15 hours/week. I want to apply to Stanford or MIT and wanted an to know is my profile decent enough to be considered at those schools? or I should stick to UCs?</p>
<p>Go to a UC. I’m not sure about MIT, but Stanford rarely, and I mean RARELY, accepts any transfers from a community college. In fact, transfers have it harder than Freshman to get admitted.</p>
<p>Yeah, I know it’s too difficult to transfer to Stanford. But I was trying to bank on being an unconventional student with over 3 years experience and by fall 13 I will have another year of tutoring experience. So i just wanted to know if with this profile it makes sense to apply to Stanford/MIT or even Caltech or it will be just waste of application fees. </p>
<p>p.s. I surely am going to apply to a bunch of UCs.</p>
<p>Unless you find a cure to cancer or participate in Super Bowl, the odds of getting admitted to Stanfurd as a transfer are against you…</p>
<p>But it doesn’t hurt to try. Keep in mind that most private schools also require SAT scores (I know MIT does), and if your primary language of instruction in high school is not English, you also need to prove English proficiency (TOEFL, IELTS, etc.) (Apparently two courses of English Composition at CCC will NOT satisfy that requirement for most private schools, unlike the UCs) But I guess you already know those since you look like a pretty well-rounded applicant. </p>
<p>I say go for it, but don’t make it a big deal if you can’t get into either of those schools. Keep in mind that Berkeley tied with them at the top in Engineering, and it’s significantly easier to get into Cal as a transfer, at least compared to the other two names you mentioned…</p>
<p>well I am 5’10, 150 pounds, only way I can participate in super bowl is if they use me as a football …
And yeah i already have given SAT (2250/2400) and TOEFL (107/120) before coming to USA.
Even though I would love to go to a UC and become an engineer, I care more about being an mechanical engineer, but being accepted to one of these premier institute is a great confidence booster …
Though thanks a lot guys!</p>
<p>What you have to understand is that the state requires the UCs to reserve 60% of their seats for upper division students and also requires them to give very strong preference to transfer applicants from CCCs. UC Berkeley alone accepts over 2,500 students a year from CCCs. MIT, Stanford and Caltech are private universities and are not required to reserve positions for transfer students and since they rarely accept freshmen not capable of doing college level work, they have very low attrition meaning very few openings for transfer students. For these few openings they get a large number of applicants from four year universities and they give no preference for community college students, In fact I am almost certain they would prefer transfer applicants who have proven they can excell at a four year university over applicants from community colleges.</p>