Stella Aslibekyan

You’re exactly right. 3.9+ is as solid as you need, GPA-wise. At the most selective schools, the rest comes down to how your ECs, letters of rec, and essays compare with those of the other applicants.

1. Short version: just ask as nicely as possible, don’t focus on the negatives of your current school, but focus on what you want to study and the opportunities you want to pursue at the schools you’re applying to.

2. Absolutely yes.

3. It really depends on how you talk about it in your essay. Coming off as unsure of what you want to study isn’t…[Read more]

Well, why do people consider one school better than another? Why is MIT considered a strong engineering/sciences school? It’s not arbitrary, there are real reasons these reputations exist. In The Transfer Book we have a whole 40-odd page section on how to determine where you should transfer to.

On the second question: you can talk generally about…[Read more]

Yup.

Based on your stats, you probably don’t need a killer essay. But it always helps, especially at the more selective schools (Wharton, MIT).

If you don’t want to sign up with us for counseling/essay reviews (Transfer Counselors), I would recommend thinking of the person you know (a teacher, a relative?) that is the best writer, and working with…[Read more]

To give you a really good answer, I’d have to look at your whole application and see how everything you say across all the questions in the application is balanced.

But, in general, being specific is better. Talking about Sloan in particular is more specific, so I would lean toward that.

If you know exactly what you want to study, I would take as many upper-level courses in that topic as you can while confidently being able to get straight-As overall.

You can still talk about wanting to be academically challenged (be very careful when discussing whether your classmates are “competitive” or not – it’s very easy to sound condescending).

However, whatever school you want to transfer to should be better than the one you’re at at what you want to study. For example, let’s say you’re studying…[Read more]

1) SAT scores: As we say in our book (this is also what we tell our counseling students), your SAT score is good enough as long as it’s above the bottom 25 percentile for entering freshmen. As a transfer, your current GPA, application, and activities matter way more.

2) Chances of getting in: decent at the schools with the higher transfer rates.…[Read more]