Transfer chances and advise

Colleges and Universities A-Z Stanford University
1

I’m an incoming freshman at Carnegie mellon’s school of computer science (who is also likely to double major in math) and am looking to transfer as a sophomore after being rejected as a freshman applicant.

Basic stats: fairly wealthy asian male. 3.93 UW Gpa in HS. Essentially perfect testing with tons of APs and SAT2s. Took Lin alg and Diffy q at a local uni, and multivariable Calc dual enrollment can, a prob/stat course online, and 3 CS coursera courses as well.

The main thing that I had going for me was that I was pretty good at math. I qualified for USAMO senior year (top 250 in math nationwide); USAMO qualifiers have a 90% acceptance rate to at least one of HYPSM. I also performed well in other important math competitions, and was an rsi alternate. The rest of my extracurriculars were fairly impressive, but nothing special for a school of Stanford’s caliber. The factors that held back my application were that I was not in the top 10% of my class in a good but extraordinary public school, and that my grades junior year were exceedingly poor after getting a 4.0 freshman and sophomore years, making it seem like I had a massive downwards trend. Thankfully, I got nearly perfect grades senior year, reversing the downwards trend. With my much better results in math competitions, slightly higher gpa, and reversal of my downwards trend, my application is a lot stronger than it was a year ago, but transfer admissions is a lot more competitive.

I’m looking to transfer to stanford (as well as harvard (waitlisted), yale (didn’t apply), UC Berkeley (didn’t apply), USC (didn’t apply), and Cornell (accepted )) because I have lot more interest in humanities (especially econ, business, and middle eastern/international affairs) than I did when applying to colleges last year and no longer think I can stand the geeky and academically super-intense atmosphere at CMU for four years.

I know my chances are probably tiny, and am also looking for advice in the process. In particular, I am wondering how I would show interest in econ and business when I cannot take any courses in those subjects freshman year.

2

Berkeley doesn’t accept transfers, and Stanford and Harvard accept less than 1%. Cornell and Yale would probably be your best bets for Ivies, and USC takes quite a few transfers - but the CS program isn’t great

3

^ lol what the hell, Berkeley has a transfer acceptance rate of 30%. USC has a fantastic CS program, any objective observer knows it’s the best program in southern california, and top 5 on the west coast. Viterbi is the second most represented school at Amazon and Microsoft - look it up on Linkedin.

4

@epicer not for sophomore transfers. They don’t accept them. Berkeley only takes junior transfers. This guy is a freshman so I said Berkeley doesn’t take transfers. Also not sure if representation at Amazon or Microsoft is a measure of quality of the CS program. I’d say representation at the hottest and most competitive and progessive/innovative tech companies is probably a better measure.