<p>Hi All,</p>
<p>Has anyone ever heard of a transfer student getting accepted with a 3.0 GPA?
I've worked full-time for the last 2 years at a corporate office, and I was unable to focus on school. I had to work to help my family, and I'm wondering would I be given the chance to note this on my application? I recently went to part-time, and I got straight A's...I know they sometimes look at the trend of your grades.</p>
<p>I don’t know how much of an advantage it would give you but you may as well note it (if I recall correctly, there was a section like “add any information that you have not yet stated on the application” or something like that for explaining this sort of thing), if your GPA changed drastically.</p>
<p>I’m not going to tell you to not apply, but to be competitive as a transfer you generally have to have a 3.8 GPA. To give you an idea, this past year 10% of all incoming freshmen were valedictorians of their high school class.</p>
<p>Agree with uscalum05 so I would have backup plans. While it is great to help your family, so do a lot of other kids. Or they spend a lot of time doing other things that doesn’t bring income to their family. You have to show you can handle doing many things at once at college.</p>
<p>That’s true.</p>
<p>Trends matter. I’m a 29-year-old transfer student. My early college transcript was littered with W’s and F’s, but when I returned to school two years ago, I earned Dean’s List, Phi Theta Kappa, etc. USC doesn’t honor grade forgiveness policies, so my transfer GPA at USC is actually lower than it was at my original institution.</p>
<p>That said, the previous posters are correct in that the school is highly competitive and the most recent transfer class had a crazy 3.8 GPA (or something comparable to that). USC uses the Common App, so if you’re developing a transfer plan anyway, it can’t hurt to try.</p>
<p>That’s good to hear. I’ll just try and keep my fingers crossed!</p>
<p>@Random New Guy- I’m in a similar situation with my grades. 2 Fs and a W, from 10+ years ago, but stellar grades now. May I ask, what did USC calculate as your GPA? Trying to determine if I should bother applying…</p>
<p>I had more units than they would take in, so they only took in the maximum (62) and I think one my crummier grades escaped the articulation process (not the F’s, however). The end result is that USC recalculated my transcript and I was admitted with a 3.5 GPA.</p>
<p>If there is a definite gap between your dodgy transcript to your new-and-improved transcript, Admissions will likely attribute that to maturity. Trends matter.</p>
<p>Trends do definitely matter, as would having a 10 year gap between some lousy grades and making straight A’s. The lousy grades will still count as part of your overall GPA, but they aren’t necessarily going to be indicative of your overall performance ability.</p>
<p>I think it’s really just an issue of growing up, and of our lousy K-12 system. High schools are the worst-performing part of the entire education system today and colleges are on the receiving end of all of that. To be fair, it’s not as though my stuff doesn’t stink as I was a CC transfer myself (had some lousy family problems in high school and college myself) and while the vast majority of CC students are lousy, unserious, and unmotivated, there are still a small number who are EXTREMELY motivated. When I was in CC, we had several elite transfers - Harvard, Duke, Georgetown, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Berkeley out of state, Notre Dame, University of Illinois Engineering, etc. - but they were the exception and not the rule. The vast majority of traditional-aged CC students that I went to school with, in previous generations, would’ve been thrown in the military by their parents as a tough love way of forcing them to grow up.</p>
<p>All of the above said, I’d work on getting your overall GPA up to at least a 3.4 to give yourself a shot. It’s just very competitive, especially nowadays as you have both a demographic bulge in terms of more students applying to more colleges, and because the ridiculous cost of college is now forcing many otherwise qualified students to start at a 2 year school that 20-30 years ago would’ve matriculated right away to a top school.</p>
<p>Just keep in mind that you don’t get in to 100% of the schools that you don’t apply to. Nobody believed that I’d get in to USC’s film school but I did. No matter what you do in life, there are always going to be cynics who’ll try to discourage you. This is why one of my favorite quotations is “those who say it can’t be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it.” ;)</p>