<p>I'm a sophomore student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and I've been thinking about transferring to a school with a more general, less engineering focused curriculum for my junior year. Do you think I have a chance at the engineering schools at the following universities:</p>
<p>Johns Hopkins
U. Penn
Dartmouth
Cornell
Brown
U. Maryland</p>
<p>With these stats:</p>
<p>GPA: 3.79 (will probably be slightly higher by the time I apply)
In EE Major: 4.0
SAT: 2170
SAT IIs: Math 800, Physics 740
President of a few clubs, fairly involved. Debate, some volunteering. </p>
<p>HS GPA: 3.4, ranked near the top 20%
Very few ECs. </p>
<p>If you don't think that I would be competitive in the admissions process at those schools, are there any other schools that you might suggest for an engineering student looking for a more balanced university?</p>
<p>Hmm. So I guess that means that UPenn, Dartmouth, and Hopkins are reaches? That was to some extent what I expected. </p>
<p>Any other suggestions for schools in the range of Cornell? I have to say, though, that I’d want a school in that range to cost less than 30k after financial aid. </p>
<p>I would consider state schools like Georgia Tech, Berkeley, or UNC Chapel Hill; but I don’t know if they would provide enough financial aid to make it an economically wise decision to transfer. I can only get in state status in Maryland.</p>
<p>Most top schools have space problem when it comes to transfer. </p>
<p>Cornell, due to its relative larger size, offer some spaces. So that’s realistic possibilities.</p>
<p>Since you have limitation of fund, maybe Cornell (top choice), Maryland (safety) and a couple of other schools (Ga Tech, John Hopkins) you like and see what happen if you can get funding. I won’t apply Brown and Dartmouth. Both have very small engineering department and it is almost impossible to get in anyway.</p>
<p>Hopkins is also fairly competitive for engineering I believe. Then again, their admit rates are quite low (around 10%) and often unpredictable. In recent years, I think there has been a year where they didn’t accept any transfer students.</p>
<p>I think Georgia tech is supposed to be like 25k with everything included (not sure - I checked very briefly a while back when deciding to apply). There are some also great engineering schools like University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign and University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, which have some of the best engineering programs, in many categories for that matter (this of course is in addition to Georgia Tech, which is a top engineering school).</p>
<p>All schools that I mention have high acceptance rates with great education (by great - I mean almost all of their engineering majors rank in the top 10 in multiple categories - meaning that since you are a general engineer, you could decide and still be at a great school for what you want to do)…</p>
<p>Here are the admittance numbers for the schools that I’m thinking about applying to. It seems prudent to have one safety, two targets, one high target, and then one reach. I don’t want to pay to have to apply to more than five schools: </p>
<p>I wonder if Cornell admits so few engineering students because admissions are actually that competitive, or if they have an issue with students coming from non-engineering schools applying without the proper background to begin an engineering education. </p>
<p>TheMan, I have thought about applying to other state schools. I think that I would really enjoy going to Berkeley or UCLA, but they are both out of my price range. I also wouldn’t want to transfer into a school that isn’t much academically stronger than WPI, because there are inherent social, academic, and extracurricular costs to changing schools.</p>
<p>How likely is it for an OOS student to get 10k of aid at Georgia Tech? I don’t know anything about financial aid probability for out of state students.</p>
<p>Right. My only speculation is that there are students from 2-year schools applying to Cornell Engineering who don’t have the right background, which would make the acceptance rate among qualified students somewhat higher than 5%.</p>