Hey all,
I was wondering if anyone had any idea about how competitive the new UCLA Public Affairs undergrad program is. Since it’s a relatively new major there is no information on transfer profile (GPA, applicants applied / accepted, etc.) online or even from the admissions office. The advisors pretty much are just saying its a shot in the dark and depends on the applicant pool of the year you applied. I know it’s unlikely, but if anyone has any sort of info that would be greatly appreciated.
As a freshman it’s been easy to move into Public Affairs, because they needed to add more students to fill the classes, and pretty much anyone from L&S could move across so long as they did it early enough in freshman year to fit in the required courses (and I think initial admissions weren’t distinguished from L&S). So I would use the L&S profile as a baseline which I think is what the transfer description implies.
Note that there’s a pretty extensive list of pre-requisites in terms of lower division courses.
Yeah I had to basically change the entire schedule this semester to meet the prerequisites for it. I can transfer into UCSB for PoliSci, and a good portion of the PA prerequisites were similar to PoliSci. That’s reassuring to know about the L&S, I guess I’m going to just shoot for it and see if I can get in next year. It really peaked my interest when I heard about it, but I heard about it a week before classes started and it was pretty much a mad race to crash the other courses I needed. Do you think having all but one of them completed by fall would be okay, I couldn’t get into one online course but have completed or will complete the remaining courses by the end of the semester. Thank you again for your help
@doddzzy . . . it’s hard to tell if the Public Affairs major will eventually be competitive with respect to gpa, but luckily you don’t about that because it’s so new, as Twoin18 stated.
Most of your social-service majors aren’t very tough to gain entry to (or at least relative to those which are thought of as remunerative); e.g., getting into an MA in Social Work program wouldn’t be nearly as tough as an MBA one. Now if they changed the orientation and name to Public Relations, it’d be different, although I’m sure one can use Public Affairs to get into PR.
I’ve been tracking the Stats major (edit: “for”) xfers (bc they’re trackable wrt gpa) from the point when the it was first offered at UCLA in the fall of 2005…, and for transfers it shows 2 persons enrolled in that year with an average gpa of 3.32 from community college compared to 2018 when 71 enrolled with 25th-75th %-ile range of gpas from 3.88-3.96. A lot of this is, of course, because of UCLA’s stepped-up perception by the public, but it’s also because Stats is an excellent major for consulting-, software-, and analyst-type jobs. The easiest major in the math department to gain entry to at the University is Mathematics for Teaching with a 3.64-3.79 and that’s because it’s a social-service type major. All the Econs, Maths, Comm, CS, Engineering . . . tough; social-service . . . not so tough and possibly pretty easy or relatively so.
Best of luck…
UCLA transfer student admit profile now has the 2019 fall stats and all the data on public affairs. I applied as this major (transfer student) for fall 2020 good luck to you