<p>Question: If I were admitted to Fu College of Engineering, and say before the start of the school year I discovered I was not destined for a career as an engineer, would I be able to transfer to Columbia College? And if so, would this be a terribly difficult process?</p>
<p>It is a terribly difficult process. You are in the same pool as other transfer applicants to the College and you are given no preference. Columbia doesn't want Fu to be a back door into the College.</p>
<p>Nice hypothetical question. It won't work. We know you applied SEAS to try and bd to college, and they know it too.</p>
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It is a terribly difficult process.
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<p>Myth that seems to exist only on this board, and is perpetuated by the administration's scare tactics. It isn't automatic, but if you do reasonably well in SEAS and have a good reason for switching, you stand a good chance.</p>
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You are in the same pool as other transfer applicants to the College
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<p>Nope, internal transfers are exactly that -- INTERNAL transfers.</p>
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you are given no preference
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<p>None? You know that for a fact? You really think some a SEAS kid has no advantage over a random dude from Podunk Community College? I don't think anyone has seen the actual numbers, but everyone at Columbia can probably point to several people who have done it. This would tend to indicate that the admit rate exceeds the normal 5%.</p>
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Nope, internal transfers are exactly that -- INTERNAL transfers.
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In point of fact, internal transfers are put in the same pool as those from NYU, Vanderbilt, etc. They fill out the exact same application, and are only known as internal transfers for administrative purposes (access to transcripts, application fee waiver, and other things).</p>
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You really think some a SEAS kid has no advantage over a random dude from Podunk Community College?
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Actually, this is debatable. If rejected by all of their colleges, Podunk students have nowhere to go. If a SEAS student doesn't get in, they can still happily and comfortably stay at SEAS, a very respectable engineering school. If you were given a SEAS and a Podunk application, everything else equal, wouldn't you want to give the acceptance to someone who can benefit the most from it? Many internal transfer candidates just want to major in Econ at the College anyway, which they can heavily expose themselves to in IEOR at SEAS.</p>
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This would tend to indicate that the admit rate exceeds the normal 5%.
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In the not-so-distant past, this would be entirely false: the admit rate for internal transfers used to be appallingly low. However, in recent years, better (read: self-selecting?) students have vied for internal transfer, probably because the bad students know it's not going to happen for them, and in turn the internal acceptance rate went a lot higher. Still, it is very low considering SEAS stats tend to be very good.</p>
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I don't think anyone has seen the actual numbers
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I have.</p>
<p>However, SEAS students are given an advantage in the process, in that the fact that they go to SEAS means that they had very good high school stats.</p>
<p>Care to share the actual transfer numbers that you've seen? I'd love to be proven wrong. PM me if you don't want them all over the board. The administration likes to scare people into not transferring, but it is in their interest to keep you at Columbia in CC rather than going to a different college (read: alumni base) if you really hate engineering. I know a number of people with 3.2ish GPAs who have made the switch.</p>
<p>I'm really not trying to "work the system" or anything like that. I honestly picked biomedical engineering as my major for Columbia since I was thinking pre-med and all that, but the more I ask around, the more I learn how ridiculously difficult a BME major is, so I now I'm leaning towards a biochem major now, which is offered in regular Columbia College. I suppose I can always just endure a grueling four years of BME if all else fails.</p>
<p>Columbia2002 is right, the difficulty of transferring from SEAS to CC is over exaggerated and it is certainly harder to go the other way. </p>
<p>buck_futters, BME is a hard major and isnt really the best/most sane route to take as a premed. If i could do it all over again i would def. be a bio major in CC.</p>