Transferring from Amherst College to the Ivy League -- is it worth it?

Transfer Students
1

I’ve been deliberating on this for a few months, honestly. It’s been really hard for me to get adjusted to college life, and I feel like that’s a big part of why I want to transfer. I haven’t really found my niche/a super great group of friends yet, which makes me feel inadequate, especially because at a school this small, everyone seems to already know everybody else. There are a lot of things I really dislike about Amherst – how tiny the town is/its location, the social atmosphere at college (literally the only thing to do on weekends/all anyone wants to do is party and I’m not about that life), the small student body, how limited the course selections are, and how few research opportunities there are on campus. I guess my two biggest concerns are location and the social atmosphere, though, which seems a little shallow of me. :confused: If I were to apply as a transfer, I’d apply to Brown, Columbia, and UPenn, although I applied to Brown as a HS senior and got rejected.

I really want to transfer because everything about Amherst is nauseatingly tiny and I’ve been steadily growing more and more depressed and jaded (and I’ve only gotten through 1/8 of college), but at the same time, I’m really worried for a few reasons. I’m not sure I can get great recommendations from two professors because I didn’t really talk much to any of my first semester professors. Of all the schools I was accepted to, Amherst was also the best when it came to financial aid (paying 9k/year instead of 17-18k/year), although I could probably swing paying more a year if I needed to. But much more than that, I’m terrified that I won’t be able to get into the schools I want to get into. I’m not coming from a community college/I don’t have a super great story to tell. I go to a great school, so it feels like I don’t have a good reason to complain – I’m much more fortunate than many others. I just really, really don’t like it here. I’m not sure if the fact that I’m coming from Amherst is detrimental to my chances or not. Plus, my acceptance record last year wasn’t as great as I hoped it would be. I got rejected from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown, waitlisted at the University of Chicago, Williams, and even Amherst (although I got off the waitlists for both LACs), and accepted into Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Carleton. I’m wary of applying to the three Ivies I have lined up because they all have acceptance rates small enough that I probably wouldn’t be able to get in.

I’m not worried about high school grades/test scores (4.0 unweighted w/ lots of APs, 2330 SAT), but I am a little worried about HS and college extracurriculars/my current GPA at Amherst. My college GPA is likely (my calc grade still hasn’t been released yet) to be a 3.6-3.7, which seems like it might be a little low. My extracurriculars in high school weren’t super great/didn’t line up with the fields I was interested in pursuing in college, which I think hurt a lot. And while I did participate in a handful of clubs/organization on campus this past semester, it doesn’t really feel like I accomplished anything. All of the organizations/meetings were fairly low commitment, although I’m not really sure what I’m expected to have accomplished in a semester of college. I guess it just doesn’t feel like my chances at getting into these schools are any better than they were my senior year of high school. They might even be lower? I just don’t know if it’s worth applying to these schools, especially when I also have to work on time allocation because I’m also applying to internships/research opportunities. And I do know that if I want to apply as a transfer, it would have to be this year or nothing, since applying after sophomore year might mean having to redo sophomore year at a different school, and I don’t want to spend five years in undergrad.

Is it worth applying? I really don’t want to spend the next 3.5 years of college unhappy, but at the same time, I don’t want to apply and get heartbroken if I get three rejections.

2

I sense the real reason you are unhappy is that you are not at an Ivy League school, and not because there is anything intrinsically wrong about Amherst. If you were REALLY serious about wanting to leave Amherst, then you would would be aiming at a more “likely” slate of schools to get out of there ASAP.

3

It’s not so much that I’m going for the Ivy name as it is that I want 1) a university in a large city 2) a university in the northeast and 3) a university that’s at the same level as Amherst. I’m conscientious of the fact that the school I’m going to is very good; I don’t care about any sort of name recognition or whatever that would come with going to an Ivy League school. It’s just that when it comes to matching those criteria, those three are the only three that I think I’d like to apply to. I just don’t want to take a course of action that’d be detrimental to my future. I wouldn’t apply to schools that are easier to get into because I don’t want to take a step down when I know Amherst puts me in a good position for grad/med school admission later.

4

You comments further validate that you are a slave to prestige. For med school, prestige of your undergrad school doesn’t matter; med school admission is all about MCAT & GPA. For grad school, overall prestige of your undergrad school also doesn’t matter; it’s going to be all about recs, GRE & GPA.

5

@GMTplus7
is right. The only thing I would point out is going to a school known for grade-inflation can help with your GPA for med-school. In that sense going to an Ivy or private can help.

Brown, Harvard, Penn, Dartmouth, and Penn are difficult to transfer into because the supplemental essay is simply the reasons for why you want to attend the school. Plus common app main for transfer is your interest in your academic field / reasons for transfer. So it’s hard to avoid a flat one-deminonsal application. Cornell is the same way but they accept more transfer.

Yale and Columbia are the better schools to apply to because transfer get the same supplements as freshman. Stanford (not an Ivy) falls into this same category. So these are the schools I would be looking into.

OP if you want to tradnfer into an Ivy then I would recommend evaluating your application last year and working on the mistakes you made. Namely in the ECs or Essays (cuz obviously your grades and test scores are solid)

6

hey! i’m a freshman at amherst too and understand your social concerns. finding friends is hard (i’ve experienced it first hand), but it definitely will happen. pm me.

7

I completely understand your sentiment and I’m actually planning to apply to the same schools as you listed. I go to one of the liberal arts colleges you got accepted to and I definitely understanding you wanting to be near a city and disliking the social atmosphere. I’m going to apply to transfer just because I think I will regret not doing and it sounds like you might as well, so I think you should go ahead with it.

8

Research matters for both med school and PhD apps. More than the “level” of your school, in fact. One big concern is that outside the Ivies, you likely won’t get close to the same amount of fin aid (and maybe not even at the Ivies). Also, you have almost zero shot at those honors programs at schools that give you dibs on research opportunities.

In any case, undergrad is only 4 years of your life. To you now, that seems like a huge amount of time, but it really isn’t, so my advice to you would be to suck it up. Happiness is a state of mind anyway. And kids change. A lot. You have little idea if you’d be unhappy at Amherst 3 years from now. Or whether you’d actually be happier at Brown.