I’m currently a first year at UCLA and honestly, so far, it sucks here. I’m not a fan of the people and atmosphere here. It’s hard to make friends unless you’re in Greeklife and there aren’t many great clubs to join, for many of them you have to apply to get in and most people get rejected. I hate it here. I was accepted to NYU my senior year but I chose UCLA over NYU and now I deeply regret it. I’m now considering transferring to NYU hoping that I’ll like it there more…? I would transfer into to the College of Arts and Sciences, would be it hard to get in? I was accepted last year but I declined the offer, does that exempt me from any part of the application process?
This is probably a stretch, but would I be able to ask them if my offer of admission still stands? Does anyone know if that works?
I don’t know if you’d be able to ask them. The only thing you can do is apply as a transfer applicant, express that you had applied in the past, and cross your fingers. Depending on your GPA and how they feel, it’s a tossup. There’s no guarantee they will let you in.
Pick up the phone. Call the admissions office. Ask whether you need to apply as a transfer, or if it is possible to simply reactivate your earlier application.
A common complaint about Los Angeles is that it’s difficult to make new friends. I wouldn’t say that’s true. I will say that LA may not be as friendly as some other places you’ll find. (Most people won’t come up to you and ask you to be their friend or invite you to some event.) But I wouldn’t say that it’s difficult to make friends. Just find an activity or a hobby that you enjoy doing and you’ll naturally make friends that way. Like bowling? Go to a bowling alley regularly and you’ll probably make friends with the regulars. Like hiking? Go hike a few times a week and you’ll meet regulars. Running? etc. You can also get on Meetup and just join groups of people with similar interests.
I’ll admit though, it may be harder to make college friends at UCLA, especially if you’re in the sciences. A lot of people are just really busy juggling a lot of different things at once. But realize that there are plenty of other people like you at the school also looking to make friends. I saw quite a few different friendships form around study groups in the library. I.e., people who were trying to satisfy their emotional needs and their life goals. The people are out there. You just need to find them.
You should try to put some effort into making friends. You shouldn’t blindly assume that you’ll like NYU any better than UCLA. It’s student body might be more disconnected than UCLA’s (they don’t even have a campus afterall.) My advice is put some serious effort into trying to make friends. And if that doesn’t work, look into transferring to NYU. But obviously do your best to keep your grades a priority before you transfer as that will make it easier to do so.
Other issues are financial aid (you’ll be expected to pay the full $65,000) and housing (transfers don’t get housing, you’ll have to fend for yourself on your own - which is even more isolating).
If you want NYC and have the money, why not check out Fordham, for instance?
NYU has almost 23,000 undergraduates. Just because it’s a private university doesn’t mean it’s going to be more personal or easier to make friends. Besides, NYU costs nearly $74,000 dollars a year if you include room and board and estimated expenses. Can your family really afford this with the limited aid that NYU would give transfer students?
I went to school near NYU, so I was mostly on “NYU campus” (and read Washington Sq. Park and Greenwich Village). I even took a course there with NYU students as a high school student and used their library… And what people are saying above is pretty much right-on. NYU won’t give you a personal feeling, if not less than UCLA. As you know, the entire school is mingled into the city. West Village, Greenwich, NoHo/SoHo, East Village…They have lots of LOTS of non-NYUers, and you can’t even tell who goes to NYU or not. A lot of students live off-campus, or even if they live in the dorm, there’s no such thing as “residential quad” and so on. Plus, NYU’s investing a lot on grad schools, so the chance is, you will find NYU pretty similar to UCLA in that sense. And as Qwerty said, NYU has A LOT of students. Including grad students, NYU have a bigger student body (although # of grad school students seems irrelevant, but this certainly affects the atmosphere of the school). As for undergraduate enrollment, NYU has a little bit more than 22K and UCLA 29K, so there’s no significant difference. At least, UCLA has a campus and sports teams that can bind students together. Of course, I’m not saying you gotta stay at UCLA. But if you really want a personal feeling, you should look for some different schools than NYU. From being with NYU students for a while, I had a feeling that NYU students are really, really disconnected to one another.
If you want a personal feel, apply to transfer to Occidental, one of the Claremonts (depending on your stats), perhaps Chapman or LMU if you’re preprofessional. If you want the East Coast, again depending on stats, you have Fordham, Marist, in/near NYC, but also Simmons in Boston, Holy Cross, Clark, Bryn Mawr… All of these would have a closer-knit community than either UCLA or NYU.
And of course that’s assuming your parents have enough money to pay for college ouf of pocket since you won’t get financial aid beside the federal loan; If they don’t, try to “make it work” at UCLA.
A way to make a large university feel small is to take classes few students take (latin, physics…), to get involved in clubs and spend time with the students there (especially academic clubs, since they may organize outings), to try and befriend students in a theme-based Living Learning Community that matches your interests since you’d have things in common, to check out when the Foreign Language Club organizes its weekly table (when people speak the language for dinner) and join it so that you eat dinner with the same people once a week and perhaps plan to go see a foreign-language movie together… (The point isn’t that you love that language, but rather that it’d be a group of people you’d see regularly and with whom you could plan to do things).