I’m a high school senior that recently got all my college results back and I’m conflicted.
SAT- 1480 (out of 1600)
unweighted GPA: 3.8
I got waitlisted and rejected from all of the UCs I applied to (UCB, UCLA, UCD, UCI, UCSB, UCSD). The main option I am considering now is to go to San Jose State for computer science. My dream school has been UC Berkeley and I really want to go, but I don’t know if transferring is worth it? Any advice? Thanks
@collegequesti . . . I don’t know how long your post will stay on this board; I’m guessing it’ll be moved.
If you go to community college and try to transfer later into Cal or some of the others – let me just answer with respect to Cal – you’re going to have to reduplicate that 3.8 or even higher to get into its CS major – I’m thinking probably in the 3.9s. But then again, you can go to cc, save some money, and then apply to SJSU and Cal and wherever else, and hopefully at least SJSU will accept you again. I’m not sure if your being admitted => you can step right into SJSU within a time period, say, a year, but you clearly had the qualifications for SJSU, and they clearly want you as a student now. That’s not going to change unless your grades dip quite badly, and I don’t think you need that 3.8 at cc for SJSU.
Take the CS admit at SJSU and make the best of it. SJSJ places lots of grads into very good jobs. Last I saw, there are more SJSU grads at Apple than there are from any other school, including UCB, Cal Poly and Stanford. If you go the CC route, you risk not getting into the program you want anyway. Bird in hand.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/transfers-major can show you what kind of college GPA those admitted to CS at various UCs tend to have, and the admit rates.
It probably is not going to be any easier to get into any UCs through the transfer pathway, other than the ones that you did not apply to this time around (UCSC, UCR, UCM).