<p>I’ll just respond to all of you posts in here.</p>
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<p>First of all, I’ve seen your stats, and I commend you on working hard to achieve your position as salutatorian. That’s not an easy feat by any means, and you should be proud of yourself. However, please do realize that those students who didn’t give a damn about academics in high school are not destined to live a life of mediocrity at a community college and are not preordained to spend the rest of their adult lives in some prosaic job that they hate. I’m not sure exactly what your counselors told you, but it’s possible that you misheard them; then again, it is possible that they left out the option of transferring. You’re right that those students who perform poorly throughout high school will more than likely end up at a college which suits their academic standards, but again, this only speaks for a student’s options immediately out of high school. I have seen many cases in which students have done a complete 180 turn in terms of grades from high school to college. Personally, I now try my hardest to attain the highest grades possible, since I don’t want to end up being the idiot that I was during the first two years of my high school career. Inversely, there are those students who have impeccable grades in high school, yet nearly fail out of college. Therefore, high school grades–just like SAT scores–are by no means an absolute indicator of how well one will perform on a collegiate level.</p>
<p>I honestly can’t blame you for believing that poor high school stats are impossible to overcome, since I used to believe the same thing. However, I implore you to now change your stance on this position. </p>
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<p>If we’re talking about the top colleges which actually allow transfers (i.e. Stanford, Yale and MIT), then yea, those are pretty rare since their transfer acceptance rates hover around 2-4% (not exact numbers, but you get the point). I won’t argue that you’ll still need great HS stats and some pretty decent college figures to get into the top five, but that’s not where the story ends. There are people on this site who have nearly failed out of high school, yet have been able to get into UC Berkeley as transfers. Then there’s those who have gotten into the University of Chicago with 3.5 (I’ll have to search the board for that story again.) There’s also been a bunch of people who have graduated high school with 3.0s, went to community college for two years, and were accepted as transfers to Cornell. </p>
<p>As you go along your collegiate career, your high school stats will matter less and less as each year progresses, which is the primary reason why some people with poor high school stats are accepted to top schools. I’m honestly not too familiar with other graduate schools, but for the purposes of law school admissions, the top 14 law schools in this country–or any other lower-caliber law school for that matter–couldn’t care less how you performed in high school, since your college course work speaks for you competency as a potential graduate student.</p>
<p>Thank you for your apology, and I too must apologize for the unnecessary facetiousness of my posts. It was just pretty offensive for you to claim that the success stories in the other thread were fictive, but I understand why you may feel that way. Just know now that life is not always restricted by the dumb mistakes some of us make during high school.</p>
<p>If you have any other questions about transferring, feel free to ask.</p>