Should I transfer as a senior? (Game Design)

Transfer Students
1

This is going to be a long post, but I literally don’t have an advisor at my university, and I don’t have anywhere else to turn for advice on this. There’s a TL;DR at the end though.

I’m currently attending one of the lowest ranked universities in the US for an unestablished game design program. I think I want to transfer. I would have been in the first graduating class for the major I’m in, which is brand new, but at the end of my junior year, everything fell apart. My program is, objectively speaking, not good. I’m not going to have the skills I need to find a job when I graduate. I want to get a master’s degree in games someday. I think getting this undergraduate degree may hurt me in that regard because it’ll make it next to impossible to get into a decent undergraduate program in game design. I think I may need a better undergraduate program to make the artifacts for the graduate application, to say nothing of the networking and employment opportunities that would be offered by a better school.

I got a 3.7 in high school with IB classes, and a 2200 on the SAT. My senior year I had some health problems which is what landed me at my last choice university. It was the only place I applied. I’m aware most schools will only look at my college GPA, which is a 3.4. I don’t think there’s much I can do to bring up my GPA because I have so many credits already.

I cannot understate my passion and certainty that making games is what I want to do. I’m a hard worker, I’m good at making games, and I’m really good at fiction writing, which I can show off in my undergraduate admissions portfolio. But is it completely insane for me to transfer in my senior year? I could get a degree and be enrolled in a master’s program by the time I’ll be ready to start my junior year at a different undergraduate school. But master’s applications are even more competitive than undergrad. I do want to get a master’s degree someday, but I don’t think I know enough about making games to make a portfolio that will get me into a game design MFA program.

This conflict is sort of coming to a head for me because I need to decide if I’m going to withdraw from classes next semester. I’d have to take a year off of school to transfer because I can’t transfer until Fall 2019 and there’s no point paying for a year of classes at my current school if I’m not going to graduate. Withdrawing from classes feels risky. My portfolio in fiction is pretty strong, I have extracurricular involvement and internships, but my GPA isn’t great. Most of the programs I’m interested in are at top 50 schools.

TL;DR
I’m a senior in college considering transferring to a better program in game design for Fall 2019.

College GPA: 3.4
High School GPA: 3.7
SAT: 2200

If I apply to a lot of schools and have a strong portfolio, is getting into a top 50 school a safe enough bet that I can withdraw from Fall 2018 classes at my current university to transfer Fall 2019? Should I just get the crappy degree from the program I’m already in and be done? I’m especially interested in the opinion of anyone who is currently in a good game design program, or who knows about the game development industry.

Thanks so much to anyone who read this entire post.

2

What other major can you graduate with in just one year? That might be your best bet. Finish up. Graduate. Get a job. Work for a while. Then decide if you do need a graduate degree, and if so in what.

3

I could get a degree with a random major in a year, but I think that would be even worse than sticking it out in my current program because my degree would be irrelevant to what I want to do. I can’t see myself getting a job making games with a degree in French or whatever. It seems like that would be two strikes against me: a bad portfolio and no degree. Am I wrong?

4

By this, do you mean that it is no longer offered?

What exactly is lacking in the program? Does the school have a regular computer science major program?

5

The program is brand new. None of the classes have run before so the professors are very much figuring things out. The courses are all project based. In most of them, none of the students actually finish the final project due to lack of guidance or resources. Students are expected to just figure it out, and when they fail to figure it out, professors assign every student across the board a B and call it good even though no one really learned anything (a big part of why my GPA is so low). In the upper division courses, professors aren’t knowledgeable enough to answer questions about their own assignments. I know so little about game development that having to retake game development courses at a different school doesn’t bother me at all. In addition, the university is located in a small city with no game design industry whatsoever, meaning students have absolutely no networking or internship opportunities in games through the major. The opportunities that are available are all related to industry (i.e. training simulations or visualizations), not to games. I don’t want to name the school because I don’t want to drag the program through the mud when it’s new and still working the kinks out. It might be good in a few years, but right now I can’t imagine a worse place to try to learn how to make games.

6

Most universities require a # of credit hours to be taken with them before they will give you a degree- typically 4 semesters worth, though there is some variation. Have you checked the policies at the schools you are considering transferring to?

What, exactly, ‘all fell apart’ at the end of last year?

From here, grad school sounds like a red herring: in a field like game design experience is going to matter more than course work. Have you focused hard on who might hire you / where you would like to work? Have you done any (relevant) internships?! If not, why not? (I call bs on not having any game design companies as an excuse, btw- our lot do/have done internships all over the map- you can find out about & apply for things w/out being physically present).

7

I would definitely have to spend two years at my new school to graduate, and like I said above, I’m ok with that because the courses I’ve been taking are so bad I learned next to nothing from them.

I thought I was going to be able to turn out a decent portfolio at the end of next year. I had been doing hours and hours of free labor for the department every week to secure this portfolio artifact I desperately needed. At the end of last semester I found out it isn’t going to be able to go in. That’s certainly what put the thought of transferring on my mind. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but up until last semester I thought if I worked hard enough I could make this program work. Now (at the very last moment) I’m starting to realize there’s nothing I can do to turn this thing around.

I’ve applied to tons of internships in games but I’ve never gotten a response. Companies are hesitant to hire someone from out of state, and since our program doesn’t have a relationship with any development studios (which is how students typically land competitive internships), it’s twice as hard to get one. I’ve applied to every internship offered by our program, period, and I did one for a few months, but it wasn’t relevant to games at all. I also did some contract work for the program for a while. Not a single student in our program has been able to get an internship in games. Not one.

Also, I just realized I forgot to respond to the computer science question above: there is a computer science major at my school, but the classes are all overbooked and difficult to get into. It would take me at least as long to get a computer science degree here as it would take for me to transfer to another school.

8

Sounds as if you have really made the decision to move. If you are asking are you very certain to get into a top-50 university as a transfer student, imo the answer is no: you are coming from what you describe as one of the lowest ranked unis with a GPA 3.5 > (HS info won’t really count at this stage, and emphasizing 2+ year old skills in a different subject than the one that is the proximate reason for your transfer won’t help your case). By all means apply to the shiny names- but also ID some solid schools whose programs are better than yours, where you are more likely to be accepted. If you are at a school ranked 3000+, there is a lot of room between that & top 50.

9

Thanks for the advice. Do you think transferring so late in the game will hurt my application? Will it be okay as long as I make it clear I’m alright with spending 2 years at my new school? I have 121 credits right now (I did a bunch of concurrent in high school). Will that hurt me or raise a red flag?

10

How many credits will transfer will depend on the school - some don’t accept DE credits towards their degree. Definitionally you have to “be alright” with completing whatever their graduation requirements are (almost always spelled out online, btw). Imo, your reason for transferring is solid- just put your back into finding programs that truly fit what you want to do, where you are a good fit for their program.