Let me preface this post by admitting that my desire to transfer stemmed completely from a craving for prestige. To achieve this goal I made some unethical choices and sought the help of less than legitimate sources. I cannot condone the actions I took, and do not recommend repeating any of the measures I followed to obtain admission.
Spring High School Senior: A barrage of rejections left me a shell of my former self. Though my grades were only average and I had no unique talents to speak of, I always imagined I would attend an Ivy League institution with the rest of my classmates.
Much like a large portion of students on this forum I was academically competent, but rarely took the initiative to set my self apart from my peers. The belief in my future success largely came from the success of my peers at my prep school. I had deluded myself for four years into believing I could achieve similar results, while maintaining my relatively idle lifestyle. Of course the inevitable occurred and during the last semester of my senior year cold reality slapped me with twelve rejections, a smattering of waitlists, and just one acceptance: a state school in the middle of nowhere. My inflated sense of entitlement shivered at the prospect of attending an institution of such low repute. The moment I signed my enrollment forms, I knew I had to escape the fate that my slothfulness had led me to.
Interim Summer: I spent an inordinate amount of time on the College Confidential transfer forum researching the transfer process. I ignored all advise of "giving my present school a chance" and "making the best of my situation". Greed and envy propelled my single minded focus to transfer, and these well meaning fell on deaf ears. Because my drive was to secure a spot at a prestigious institution with no regard to fit or culture, I crafted a intended college list included nearly all of attainable Ivy League (excluded: HYP and Columbia) and many other top 20 institutions.
I also learned of the importance of the college GPA in the transfer process. My high school GPA was rather meager, as I sat at the very top of the bell curve. I decided to focus all my efforts on ensuring a high GPA in college. My parents were encouraging, but had suspicions of my motives. They insisted that I pursue a degree in a certain engineering field, as they feared I would repeat my mistakes in high school and while away my time. Of course this made my GPA plans more difficult but I figured my competition in state school would poor, so getting high grades would be simple regardless of my major.
Fall College Freshman: Nearly all my suspicions about state school rang true during my first months at college. My peers in engineering disappointed not only with their lack of academic talent, but also by their utter dysfunctionality in social settings. Attaining my intended GPA was a far more straightforward process than I had even hoped. In fact the only inhibiting factor was my own desire to take part in greek life, get drunk and high on a weekly basis, and attempt to hookup with DTF state school sluts.
I continued to troll through the Transfer board here during my free time and learned that after the college GPA, the next most important factor was the argument for 'why' I wanted to transfer universities. Now this proved to be far more challenging than the GPA aspect. I couldn't very well say "I only want to attend your institution because I'm a greedy prestige whore." After a months worth of thought I came up with a completely bullshit reason centered around the lack of availability of a certain concentration in my specific field of engineering that I desired to pursue at the various institutions I was trying to transfer to. I ended the semester with a 3.7/4.0. Looking through the "Chance Me" threads I found this to be frightening low for successful transfer applicants.
Spring College Freshman: By the virtue of attending such a large state school I was lucky enough to befriend a couple of other transfer applicants. After some discussion they revealed that they essentially had the same reasoning to transfer as I did: prestige. If any readers are looking for advice at this point: finding friends who are also interested in transferring makes the process a lot less stressful, regardless of their noble or less than intentions. Around early April was the time to submit all the CommonApp applications and supplements. I had by this time narrowed down my list to eight school, which I settled on applying to. The schools included a couple of Ivys and a bunch of other highly ranked private schools.
The only way to describe my application is clusterfuck. Even though I had been through the application process once before, I let it wait until the last month before I even looked at the CommonApp and supplements. The university admissions committees really only see four pieces of information to make a decision on transfer applications: college GPA, high school GPA, essays, writeup of extracurricular activities. Obviously the first two, college and high school GPAs, were set in stone by this point, but I still had full control over my essays and writeup of extracurricular activities. Now I should mention that I did not partake in many activities through my freshman year. I did attend some club meetings, as well as secure a job in the admissions department as a tour guide though.
When I saw the extracurricular page on the CommonApp I nearly had a heart attack. There were seven or so empty field to enter activities and I had nearly nothing to speak of aside from my job in admissions. At this point I realized that there was no way for any university to verify my claims on the application, and so long as I legitimized my activities by writing earnest and passionate sounding essays about my fabricated experiences, there would be no way of telling that my activities were false. My one attendance at the Environmental Protection Society turned into "Executive Board Position, Organized blah blah blah...etc.", and my acquaintance with an upperclassman involved with a professional engineering development organization became "Blah Representative for X Engineering Organization, planned blah blah blah activities...etc.".
My essays were no better. For my CommonApp essay I bullshitted around my fabricating reasoning for transfer for around three hundred words and threw in a passionate anecdote for good measure. Unfortunately I had barely anytime to edit and proofread the thing before I sent it out. At the recommendation of one of my friends I sent it into an online essay editing service which cost me a pretty $300. The service looked shady and seemed like they wrote essays for liberal arts courses for a small fee. If you are interested in the service I guess you can PM me. I sent the applications off, and actually missed the deadline for a couple of the universities by a day or so, which worried me.
The decisions started rolling in during finals week and the early months of summer. My transferring companions managed to all get accepted to their desired schools. Though I was genuinely happy for them, I started to worry as I had been rejected by the same school yet again. By the time the school year ended I was rejected from three of my eight schools. At this point I pretty much gave up hope, as one of those schools was the lowest ranked school I had applied to. I nearly fell into depression, though I do not actually know if you could consider it clinical depression, it certainly felt like it to me. Of course I knew I did not deserve to go to any of the universities I had applied to, especially considering the unethical ways I had conducted my application, but I was saddened nonetheless.
Three weeks into my summer break, I had resigned myself to another year of state school before I tried once again to transfer out. continued...
↧