Taking a semester off while transferring: Harmful to admission chances?

Applying to College
1

Hey everyone,

I’m currently a first year student that attends my college from out of state. Due to financial constraints, I will need to transfer to an in-state school for Fall 2019, in order to continue affording college. Because I can hardly afford to stay another semester here, it wouldn’t make sense for me to do so. If I were to return home for the spring semester and work full-time while applying as a transfer student for Fall '19, would not having attended for the second semester, thus having only 12 completed credits, negatively impact my chances of getting accepted to those colleges?

To break things down, I’m currently taking 12 credits, as stated above (and will have completed 12 by the time I will begin college as a transfer student), and have a 3.5 GPA, which will ideally change for the better by the end of the semester. The two schools in which I am applying to have 78% and 80% transfer student acceptance rates respectively. I had 15 credits initially, but was forced to withdraw from one course worth 3 credits. Hopefully a W won’t look awful when applying to these schools either, but if anyone has any insight on that too, that’d be incredibly helpful. I elected to go with it over getting a poor grade in the class as it would have tanked my GPA, looking bad on the surface to said schools that value GPA over almost everything else. Even though it was early on in the semester, I received a 0 in said class for missing an exam day, the exam being worth 20% of my grade, so I didn’t want to resort to my best possible grade being a C+.

Thanks in advance for any information or help given with this, as it’s been a bit of a road trying to figure things out. If anyone needs any other information to determine what route to take, please let me know.

2

It won’t negatively affect your application but the fewer college hours you have the more schools will look at your HS record.

3

I agree with @“Erin’s Dad”. I don’t see any problem here. Taking a semester off for financial reasons should not hurt you at all, particularly since you are looking to transfer to a more affordable in-state school. I am also not concerned about your having one single W.

Try to do as well as you can in the 12 units that you are taking, and be aware that your high school record will still matter quite a bit given that you have only 12 units of college classes.

Based on what you wrote I think that your plan is quite sensible and realistic.

4

And for some schools, with only 12 credit hours you may not even qualify as a transfer student- you would apply as a first year, again based largely on your HS record.

5

Both schools have a minimum of 12 credit hours to be consider a transfer applicant, so I’d be all set on that front. Thank you guys for the help/advice, I really appreciate it!