Transferring A Third Time From An Ivy to Alabama?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Alabama
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I’m very confused. You say your parents are paying a significant amount for you to attend Columbia. You also say that they are transient and have no state of residence. And now you say their income has gone up.

I’m sorry, but these statements really don’t align for me.

You have two choices if you want someone beside yourself to pay for college.

  1. Stay at Columbia and start looking for the positives that are there for you instead of focusing on the negatives.

  2. Take a gap year. Get a job with Starbucks or Amazon. Or I think Fed ex. Don’t those employers pay for college courses for their employees? You could also look for jobs at some college where employees get tuition benefits.

You don’t seem happy with college….so I’m having trouble understanding why you are there except to please your parents. If you want to follow through with that…just complete your degree at Columbia and then move on to whatever it is you think you want to do.

I guess you don’t understand how lucky you are to have parents who are willing to pay this college bill.

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Feel free to PM me.

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No disrespect to you OP but I really understand your frustration now that you’ve pointed this out and it’s making me SMH……some clubs have 40 people on the executive board?...so each one can claim a leadership role on the EB? Sounds a lot like all those college applicants that started a non-profit in HS. I sincerely hope corporate America isn’t duped by all this phony baloney ”leadership” these kids are shoveling onto their resumes while “leading” a club comprised of only board members.

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The OP doesn’t need a leadership role. The OP can go to folk-dancing, be the person who puts out chairs before the poetry festival starts, asks “what can I do” when the “Alliance for the Homeless” starts to plan for their annual coat drive on the upper west side. These are tried and true ways of making friends, making connections, feeling less adrift or feeling that everyone is rich and well connected.

There are plenty of non-competitive activities at Columbia, there are plenty of needy people living within a 2 mile radius of the OP, there are plenty of jobs that don’t require having connections or an influential family.

And there are thousands of kids who get jobs with a liberal arts degree who never had an internship.

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Oh absolutely! I’m just trying to wrap my head around the idea of a cultural club comprised solely of executive board members. So different than when I went to college in the dark ages.

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Maybe if they go to grad school, but straight out of undergrad? Unlikely.

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I work with people who still do this…and I’m old.

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You’re right Mr. Pity Party. Only 68.6% of students are working after undergrad . Next you’ll tell me 100% of them are engineers. And only engineers or IB get good salaries.

You are in a situation. Going to another school will potential employers you are unable to commit.

Stop naysaying. Work with the career center. You are creating issues that don’t exist. You are deflecting blame from where it obviously exists.

Again seek help. For yourself and your career.

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To apply to 50 positions, I hope you mean with cover letter and contacting alums at the hiring companies. Extensively utilize your LinkedIn account.

Some law schools will give you huge scholarships if you get 99% on LSAT like you did on the PSAT.

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Stop making assumptions about me. I’ve “worked with” the useless Columbia Career Center countless times, and they didn’t help. And you’re in no situation to judge me on that unless you were sitting in those Zoom meetings with me.

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Might I remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."

and

“College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else… If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.”

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/guidelines

Putting thread in slow mode until morning

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OP — if you want to segue into a technical field, perhaps a well-regarded programming bootcamp after graduating (from Columbia, hopefully) would allow you to land what you consider to be a more-desirable job. That way you could keep your original major and your parents would continue to pay for your bachelor’s, and you still have a plan/path for a potential technical career.

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Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve definitely thought about enrolling in a programming bootcamp after graduating. My parents told me that they’d never pay for a second bachelor’s (and I don’t blame them), but I’d be open to trying to finance it on my own.

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Some ideas:

I agree with those who are saying that your best bet is to get through the next two years at Columbia.

I know you say you’ve tried working with the career center and you’ve attempted joining executive boards of different school clubs. If neither of those worked for you - there are still plenty of other options at Columbia and in NYC.

  1. Start networking with your professors. Go to office hours, ask them to coffee to talk about their area of expertise and how it relates to your plans and aspirations. My daughter in college has been offered several jobs/internships on campus - all from professors she made relationships with. She has been contacted (unsolicited) by professors she did not know because they were given her name by a professor she did know.

  2. Start (or continue) to attend talks/discussions/debates in the departments you are interested in - even if you don’t have the space in your schedule to take classes in that department. Again, it is a great way to meet others interested in the same fields of study, and also network with the professors and students who also are willing to take the time to be at those talks.

  3. Investigate volunteer/internship opportunities outside Columbia. You are living in NYC - many museums are always looking for volunteers willing to go through the training to become docents. Public and private schools are good resources if you actually want to tutor (elementary through high school). You can also just google volunteer opportunities on the upper west side of manhattan - dozens of options came up when I glanced at that. Again, that is a great way to meet people with common interests, learn how to network and build you human capital.

  4. Start really looking at the opportunities offered on campus. Look at the calendars and see what is being offered; concerts, paid speakers, intramural sport events, residential programing, school subsidized city experiences. Start going to those - you may feel out of place at first but practice makes it easier and again you will meet like minded people, network and get out of your own head a bit.

  5. Explore the city. There is so much available, don’t get stuck just staying on the UWS. When I lived in New York, I got a job offer from a conversation struck up at a party I was invited to by a friend I met at a gallery.

  6. Be open to opportunities not in NYC (with internships, summer jobs). If you want to go into banking - look beyond the biggest market if you don’t have the best resume. Chicago, Charlotte, Atlanta, Dallas - there are lots of places you can intern.

  7. Figure out some tangible goals to work towards. If you aren’t getting anywhere with your resume and cover letter - use the career center to help you rework them. Don’t go in asking how they are going to find you a summer internship - go in to get specific feedback on how to strengthen your resume and cover letter. If they can’t improve those two things, ask one of your professors you have been working with, attending office hours and building a relationship with to look it over and give you feedback.

  8. You have a job on campus already - is it in a department you enjoy or are interested in? If it isn’t, consider looking to change your part time job and start applying for jobs on campus that would move you towards your goals (whatever they may be). Often times there are jobs in academic departments specifically targeted to undergrad students.

  9. Create and/or ask to join study groups in your current classes. Ask other students in your classes to go out for coffee/lunch/walk/whatever to talk about the class and to get an idea of what those students are doing or have done that they enjoy. Ask them questions about themselves, and don’t necessarily get into your frustration about your introduction to the college. Look at these as fact finding missions, and network building - not grievance parties.

  10. Practice self-care (if you have let it slip). Do your best to eat healthily, shower/groom daily, get exercise and present yourself with your best foot forward. You will feel better and more confident which will show to others.

  11. Look at summer programs that might help your long term goals, even if it doesn’t connect exactly to your school year study. Maybe you want to learn an in-demand foreign language - an accelerated language program or some other summer study program might be something to look at for a summer if the internships don’t come through.

  12. Start working the alumni network. It is huge in NYC and you can reach out cold and ask to do information interviews, coffee, etc. Some might be by phone, by zoom, and some may be in person - all are good ways to build connections.

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50 applications or jobs isn’t that many these days-I am certain one of my kids applied to more recently. Given the ease with which applications are done online, the numbers have gone way up.

So finish your degree as quickly as you can, and spend your time applying to every company headquartered in NYC that you can find-communications positions, program management, hospitality, even bank trainee. You can ramp up the job search on your own, and I bet will find something soon. That will help your mental health too. You can postpone socializing if you want and just focus on the goal of graduating, hopefully employed.

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I’m sorry you are going through a difficult transition. There’s been plenty of advice about ways to get involved so I won’t repeat those. Getting an internship for the summer before senior year is rough, especially for those looking in finance/analyst type roles. It is very competitive and it feels like everyone else has a leg up. I can share, from the experience of my own middle class kid-without-contacts in the business world, that the career center can be valuable for providing tools for networking with alums, from career talks to informational interviews etc., and then those alumni relationships can prove to be what helps get over the hump in getting an internship (or job). Hang in there.

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All due respect- you are wrong.

I’ve been hiring for large corporations for 35 years. Every big company in the US hires writers- every single one. Boeing needs writers. Pfizer needs writers. Ad agencies need LOTS of writers. These jobs don’t go to computer scientists- they go to young people with degrees in history and English and Comp Lit and anything else which teaches disciplined, terse composition.

Every large company has a Human resources department. There are people who work in employee relations (very critical now with Covid, the new rules/restrictions), compensation, recruiting, benefits, organizational development, etc. In order to advance beyond entry level, only organizational development really requires grad school (either in psych or a Masters/Doctorate in org). The rest require a good worth ethic, the ability to think logically, and being able to demonstrate that you learn new stuff quickly. I’ve hired dozens of young grads with humanities degrees for these roles.

Every large company needs sales people. etc. You get my drift.

Your negativity AND lack of curiosity about what actual 22 and 23 year olds do for a living is going to hurt you. If Career services isn’t helping you, then put that on pause. Focus on your classes and on doing well. Focus on YOU and figuring out why you’ve dug yourself into the hole you seem to be in.

I just met a young guy (maybe 26) who graduated from a directional state U (trust me, you’ve never heard of it) with a C average who is blowing the cover off the ball at a cool start up. He got a job there as a temp- answering phones and cleaning up the mess the programmers made in the kitchen, ordering office supplies. He’s now a project manager on a really interesting product development team. Not a product manager (those jobs go to the coding/tech folks) but a project manager- the guy who makes sure the development team is on task, on budget, has the resources they need. He’s the guy who communicates with senior management (see, those good writing and speaking skills come in handy) and the guy who makes sure that the two techies who have decided they hate each other can work together (those interpersonal skills come in handy).

Even tech companies need people who AREN’T tech people.

If this all seems too daunting for now- just focus on getting through, taking courses which will give you portable skills (reading, writing, logic, interpreting data- statistics or psych is good for that).

But drop the attitude. We’re all trying to help you, and your negativity makes it hard to give you concrete suggestions.

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Try to get over the mindset that life is a straight arrow (great college experience, perfect internship, you graduate with the perfect job, etc) because it’s not. There are all kinds of twists and turns, and even if you don’t see those twists and turns in others - I guarantee that they are there.

You have the opportunity to attend Columbia. Some/many can’t even apply because if they happen to get in, they can’t afford it. Many of daughter’s friends from college had majors such as sociology, psychology, biology, English, etc. They were all employed in good jobs following graduation. All of them- every single one. How do I define “good”? It means they made enough money to live in an apartment, away from home, with a roommate. It means that they learned something, made friends, etc. Will they stay at these jobs forever? Absolutely not. They are stepping stones to other types of jobs, grad school, etc. There is no perfect life at 22.

My daughter’s friend worked on a college campus following graduation. She made enough to pay her bills and was able to get her masters for free at the school (part time). That’s another good option.

NYC has some of the best health care in the world. Please find a therapist who can help you, if you have not already.

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an alternative is for you to transfer back to your original Ivy. I assume your parents would be Okay with it since it’s an Ivy, you wouldn’t have the constraints of the Core, and since you’d have been there for a few semesters you’d have at least some knowledge in navigating the school and its rules, clubs, etc.
Transferring back isn’t that unheard of, BTW.

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I don’t know why your experience of every single aspect at Columbia U is different, but my daughter was active in two of these “other” clubs/organizations (very hands-on/expressly physical, none of them executive), one related to the local music scene, the other was serving the Morningside Heights community. They were assigned to food kitchens and community centers around the neighborhood, where they actively solicited and matched people’s immediate needs with available city, volunteer, state etc resources—from getting mobile phones to getting clothes for interviews.

So other than those few who just want to manage, how did the vast majority of many hundreds of Columbia students ever get involved as general members in their clubs?

You seem to paint an almost kafkaesque scenario, where you can’t escape two Ivys, career services, clubs, the “Rich”, the “Connected”, employers,…
I’m starting to wonder, if you are seeking guidance at all, or just forcing an outcome you have (maybe subconsciously) already decided on?

If your decision is to transfer to AL, because the Ivy’s were shoved down your throat by your parents when you were still a teenager, in complete disregard of your own needs, wants and psychological makeup - then you don’t need to desperately assign blame to any groups or organizations to validate your decision.
It’s perfectly okay for you to fix whatever situation your family created, now that you can make better-informed decisions for yourself.

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