I’m applying to: Yale, Columbia, NYU, UPenn, UCBerkeley, Brown
Might apply to: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, UCL
Female
Accredited public uni College GPA: 4.0 Consistently made Dean’s Honor list
Major: Finance with premed track
College Extracurriculars:
Founder and President of a club to help disabled students part of a competitive dance team
Student Government Senator
Investment Club
DECA
Cultural Awareness Association
Several Pre-med clubs
Research with my professor (possible publication)
Shadowing doctors (over 50 hours)
*Planning to start a charity organization to raise funds to provide educational opportunities in my hometown (rural area) in india
Community Service: over 300 hours Peer Tutoring Volunteer at Hospital
Now here is my concern.
High School:
GPA UW: 2.7 SAT: 2080 (CR: 720 M: 690)
Multiple Extracurriculars
Some volunteering
All AP classes but I got bad grades
My Background:
I was raised by my relatives and I had a hard time accepting my parents after i moved to america. And due to culture shock, bullying at school and mental abuse from parents, i stopped trying. I suffered from depression and probably ADD and I just gave up on life and didn’t show interest towards anything. I tried to end my life several times but thankfully nobody knows about it. I don’t know what i was thinking but i was never able to get proper help from an adult.
Essay: Im thinking about writing about how a loved one died because of inattentiveness of the doctor and how the death shaped my life.
I decided to transfer because i realized medicine isn’t my passion and i was forced into it by my parents. I want to transfer to the economics program at yale because it can lead me to opportunities which my current school can’t give me. I know that its extremely hard to get in but I just want to try my best.
What is wrong with the economics major at your current school?
If you will be a junior level transfer, your college record will be most important, though if a college asks for your high school record, it will be considered.
To prepare to transfer in economics at the schools you named, it is best to complete introductory economics, calculus, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and a calculus-based statistics or probability theory course. Some of the schools you named have a heavily mathematical emphasis in economics.
Have you checked into the cost and financial aid at each school? Berkeley does not offer financial aid to out-of-state students, and NYU has a reputation for poor financial aid in general.
I was in a similar situation before I transferred colleges. What I found during the process was that the higher a schools retention rate, the lower their transfer student acceptance rate. Which makes sense right? A school admits transfer students to fill holes made through attrition. The problem is, the Ivy schools and Ivy adjacent typically have really high retention rates, so you are likely to look at situations where maybe 1% of transfers are accepted to UPenn or Yale each year.
With the transfer admissions process being even more competitive than the general admissions process, you can assume that there might be higher scrutiny on your high school record. That being said, take ownership of your record. Explain why you ended high school with a 2.6 and what growth you went through to achieve a 4.0 in college, it doesn’t help to try to ignore or hide blemishes from the admissions committees.
If you are committed to transferring then I would recommend expanding your search criteria to include some schools that are outside of the Ivy tier but would still be acceptable to you. Check the transfer admissions rate for the schools your interested in and plan accordingly. Just like with general admissions, make a list of reach and safety schools and cover all of your bases.
I believe all those school include your HS info for transfers (check the Common Data Set for each, section D). I think your sights are set way too high.