I am a sophomore currently studying economics at Northwestern University.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I do not like the atmosphere and people here at Northwestern and I was looking to transfer to UT Austin.
The main issue for me is that my performance at Northwestern has not been stellar and I only have a 3.0, which is about the average for the Northwestern Economics program. I feel like I am wasting my time and money there and would like to transfer to UT because I believe it is a much better environment for me to succeed and be happy.
I am from Dallas and was admitted to McCombs through automatic admission, but I chose to go to Northwestern instead.
The problem is that the deadline for fall transfer was March 1, and I would have to transfer for the spring of next year. Normally this would be fine and I was going to take next semester off and so an internship in that time period and perhaps take some classes at community college, but I found out that McCombs does not accept spring transfers. This means that I would have to transfer into economics here at UT and then hopefully transfer internally to Business the next fall.
I am scared that if I am in economics here at such a low GPA and without the consideration that I am transferring from Northwestern with an average GPA of 3.0, which at UT would be terrible, I wouldn’t make it into McCombs. The transfer process should be automatic because I qualified in high school for automatic admission as per the UT site. Will the fact that I was previously accepted into McCombs help me?
The only thing holding me back at this point is this issue and I would appreciate any advice on what I should do.
Economics student here, I am not very clear if your intention is to get into McCombs Business program or Economics, so I would just clarify a little bit here:
Economics is not part of McCombs but falls under College of Liberal Arts. Thus, UT's economic program is nowhere as prestigious as McCombs programs such as Finance, Accounting, Administration...
As I mention above, since Economics is not in McCombs, it is also not competitive at all to get in. If you make it to UT, then it's a piece of cake to get into Economics. I got into UT last fall as an undeclared and transfer to Econ early this spring. There was no formal "transfer process," all I did was put my name on a sign-in sheet at their information session and the next day I become an Econ major.
If your heart is set on McCombs and not Economics, that would be tough. I can tell you it's incredibly hard to transfer into McCombs. For internal transfer, I heard that the cut off was 3.6 last year, for external transfer you should expect a 3.8 to get in.
The fact that you have automatic admission to UT out of high school means nothing, unfortunately. As a transfer student, all they consider is your college grade (also dual credits if applicable). There are people who were accepted to UT as freshmen but turn it down, and then got denied as a transfer a year later.
Hopefully this will help you reconsider your choice. If you really want to enter McCombs, I would suggest got into UT first, work your GPA here up to about 3.6 or 3.7 and do internal transfer.