Should I just try to get into the U of M and do really well there then try and transfer after my freshman year?
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What University can I expect to get in?
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Yes always apply to a few safety schools. You might find you really like U of M and not want to transfer.
Something good advise ALL freshman should follow. GET INVOLVED at school.
When I first started at Texas Tech some things were rather rough on my my first few weeks there and it only really got better after I got involved with one of the organizations on campus and them some people from my dorm room.
Now I joined a bible study group and made some great friends. Other people I know got really involved in a organization for their major and my last few years at Tech I moved that way.
Another thing I did was played some of the intermule sports at the rec center.
As for transferring. The grass is not always greener. You might transfer to UofC and find out that you really miss UofM and all your friends there and figure out the name of the school on the degree NOT THAT IMPORTANT. The friends you make there and what you learn is what is important.
Just get involved and make some friends. There will be some group there that will really interested you.
Not worth it in my opinion. The transfers I knew spent freshman year being unsatisfied, then left all of their new friends behind, and the incoming transfers sophomore year had a lot more trouble getting involved and meeting people. Not having orientation and not living in the dorm with all the other freshmen who want to meet each other can really make it tough.
Find a couple of places you think you'd enjoy going and stick with them. Apply, get in, visit campus, do an overnight on campus, meet some people, go to a party, get excited about the school the summer beforehand, and enjoy the four years while you can...you only get to do it once. Let yourself enjoy it and forget about the 'what ifs'.
What do you want to study? While this question is more meaningful for grad school, it's not totally out of the question for undergrads. If you have an idea about what you want to study, have a look at course offerings from the department to see if those are the types of classes you'd be interested in. As an undergrad I turned down UCL for a smaller university simply because I wasn't interested in their course offerings. Retrospectively, it was one of the better decisions I've made in my life.
Also, what size university would you like to attend? There's a huge difference between Chicago and Grinnell. Some students like the anonymity of large universities while others feel alienated.
Don't go in with the intention of transferring. It can be bad for your social life.
Also, what size university would you like to attend? There's a huge difference between Chicago and Grinnell. Some students like the anonymity of large universities while others feel alienated.
Don't go in with the intention of transferring. It can be bad for your social life.
Man do not get my started on how piss poor our universities are at handling transfer students. I transfered into Texas Tech from a community college. TT is great at getting freshmen involved and getting them all set up. They have tons of gathering for them. Also they help freshmen learn the ins and out of the system. Transfer students have to struggle learning everything on their own and struggle getting involved in anything because everyone really only goes after the fish.
My college had overaccepted and had a housing shortage when I came back from fall semester abroad my junior year...I got placed with a random roommate who happened to be a transfer from community college. He was academically a freshman but they'd put him in a big upperclass dorm, far away from all of the freshmen and with an exchange student as a roommate. He didn't appear to have any friends when I got to school, so I invited him to party with my friends and he met a lot of people through me.
His situation made finding friends and getting adjusted many times harder, and fundamentally changed his college experience. Freshman year was all about learning the social ropes of the school with a bunch of other people who knew as little as I did. Without the rest of the people in the dorm you're totally on your own. I really recommend trying to do all four years at once school, no regrets.
Yeah I was kind of like you room mate. I had a rough first few weeks but end up getting connected with some people and from there things got a lot better. But it was a lot harder to get involved with out have the orientation plus I jumped a lot of the freshman classes and was straight into my major. That means I did I was trying to interact with people who already had their own connections.
Top 10% of your graduating class and SAT above 2100 (preferably 2200+).
Get there this year man and you can go where you please and have all sorts of money thrown at you.
I got into Northwestern on a full scholarship and absolutely hated it when I visited. I go to USC now but I got offers everywhere with some money attached which was a blessing for my parents.
For real dude forget clubs and all that stuff it's so pointless trust me. Have just one or two passions and write about them in your essays. When you fill out your applications don't be stressed out just paint a picture of who you are. Basically I completed my apps as recklessly as possible (spellcheck and grammar but don't go drafting like a psychopath...just jot down yourself and make that thing breathe you so the admissions office really understands you in just a few pages).
Apply to everything and everywhere. Find special schools with great programs in diverse fields and do it man. There is no predictable outcome with college admissions so apply to everything you're even mildly drawn to and commit to those apps as a person not as a robot.
Lock in! Best of luck!
Get there this year man and you can go where you please and have all sorts of money thrown at you.
I got into Northwestern on a full scholarship and absolutely hated it when I visited. I go to USC now but I got offers everywhere with some money attached which was a blessing for my parents.
For real dude forget clubs and all that stuff it's so pointless trust me. Have just one or two passions and write about them in your essays. When you fill out your applications don't be stressed out just paint a picture of who you are. Basically I completed my apps as recklessly as possible (spellcheck and grammar but don't go drafting like a psychopath...just jot down yourself and make that thing breathe you so the admissions office really understands you in just a few pages).
Apply to everything and everywhere. Find special schools with great programs in diverse fields and do it man. There is no predictable outcome with college admissions so apply to everything you're even mildly drawn to and commit to those apps as a person not as a robot.
Lock in! Best of luck!
Yeah, especially if you go into something like chemical engineering, where the U of M takes a pretty hot steamy dump all over the rest of the country sans MIT and Berkeley (of whom it constantly volleys 1st/2nd/3rd place grad AND undergrad chemE programs with), or any of the many other top 5 or top 10 programs that the U of M has. The U of M is also a top 5 public research university in the country.
Get a clue, kid. Have you even looked into the U of M, or any other schools in Minnesota or are you just trying to blindly go for name bragging rights? Because if you are, Northwestern and U of C aren't going to ooh and ahh anyone in the world of academic elitism.
School name doesn't matter, the program you study does. And at that, school name matters even less for a generic undergraduate degree.
Apply to where you want to go and also a few Community Colleges at home. Don't go to a state school you don't want to attend just to get away, especially if you are the one paying. Attend a Community college, live at home, then hopefully your grades are improved so you can attend the school you want to.
Truth. It may very well be borderline for the U of M as well.
Truth. I know a lot of people who came out of the U of M chemical engineering department with offers from Exxon/Dow/SJ/etc. for $73-$82k starting, plus sign on and relocation bonuses. One guy even got offered $102k to start on at SJ (albeit because it was on an oil rig). Recruitment at the U for chemE companies was fierce, with most people balancing several offers.
True. Madison is also a pretty decent school overall. Great chemE school. A prof of mine did undergrad at Yale, and a PhD at Madison. Spent years as the president of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and hands down one of the best professors I or anyone else had. Brilliant.
Yep.
Excellent advice.
yojitani said:
Also something to consider. The U of M I believe is the second largest university in the country (~58000 students) but it was still great, and all my teachers knew my name because in addition to lectures, there were smaller discussions with the professors or TAs (but always professors themselves in upper division courses) so it never felt like you were a number. Not to mention a big school/campus was just nice, especially five minutes from downtown Minneapolis and plunked right in SE Minneapolis where there were plenty of bars/restaurants/coffeeshops. You never felt like you were AT SCHOOL like at other campuses which have like a main gate to the campus. The U of M as an example is plunked down right in the middle of Minneapolis which I thought was cool.
Funny thing--a buddy of mine went to the U for his chem undergrad, and Northwestern for his chem PhD he just finished. I visited him there a couple years back and hated it just as well. Too small, too isolated, too enclosed. Definitely a college town with nothing to do and a bit of a lengthy ride from downtown Chicago. Conversely I find the U of M campus absolutely beautiful; just went back there for the first time since I graduated about two weeks ago and I miss it a lot. Lots of good times there.
Anyway OP I'm not trying to plug the U of M as a graduate of it, but I'm telling you to open your eyes and consider everything that actually matters instead of "well it's a lot better to say I went to Northwestern than the U of M." Nobody will care, especially in industry if you go into a field that that school doesn't have a good program in. Also don't dog on MN schools--they aren't as easy to get into as you necessarily think.
Apply lots of places, visit lots of places, and make the decision that's best for your personality and for what you want to study--not for what you get to say at the end of four years. FWIW I'm a U of M graduate who was recently offered a chance to go $140k into debt at Columbia for a masters in an unrelated field. As an undergrad, just do as well as you can and you can go anywhere for graduate school, where program name, research interests, and faculty reputations weigh a lot more.
!!!
Rethink U of M TC. It is considered a "Public Ivy League School" by most, and is a VERY nice school.
With a GPA of 3.1, you are going to need to slay your ACT or SAT to get into Northwestern or Chicago. U of M TC would take you (probably) if you did decent on your ACT, I'm guessing a 29 would do it with your mediocre GPA and impressive extra curricular rap-sheet.
I never bought into the whole "Good School = Good Job" thing either.
Advice: Take a KAPLAN SAT/ACT course. After my course, I dominated my SAT (as opposed to my PSAT score) and got my out of state tuition to Montana State knocked down to what it would have cost me to go in-state through scholarships, making up the cost of the course 100 fold in tuition savings.
Name of the school means virtually nothing.
What you do, what you learn, how you apply it, how you stand out is important. I go to medical school with people from the prestigious Ivy League and some who went to some dinky community college. When blinded to their university, I can't tell people apart. Everyone is different.
Life experience >> School Name. Anyone who brings up the name of their training institution (for reasons other than its unique contributions to a very specific field of training, such as going to Iowa State for Agricultural Science), is foolish and smacks of an insecure or unqualified candidate.
Excellent candidates always stand out based on the balance of their collective application, not by banking on the name of an institution. Think about it: is anyone intrinsically qualified just because they paid a bunch of money and went to a place? Is someone a good painter just because they were friends with Picasso?
Moreover, you aren't apparently looking into the economics of higher education and how the ROI is declining for many college degrees. Unless you plan on majoring in something where the substance of the undergraduate degree is actually meaningful and applied towards a post-graduate occupation specifically, many degrees are a waste of precious resources. Prestigious Schools = Expensive Schools = Expensive, useless degrees in some fields. Many, many people will argue with me, although they typically have some invested interest in keeping the status quo, and not generating too much deep inquiry into the relative value of a generic college education in America anymore.
My advice: go to college as CHEAPLY as possible. Find a school that has a program you like, do plenty of interviews, ask tough questions, do plenty of comparisons and contrasts to find pros and cons of each little detail of each program. Little things matter: U of Chicago, for instance, is a great school but the cost of living in Chicago is comparatively higher than some other places, and if you are extremely busy with school, all the culture in the world in the city of Chicago won't mean anything if you're too busy to enjoy it.
Go to community college for awhile and learn a TRADE (electrician, plumbing, carpentry, automotive repair), and use this skill to MAKE MONEY while also getting excellent grades in a few general education courses that would cost thousands at a big name University. Apply in a few years and STAND OUT as an excellent candidate with applied skills, good financial position, life experience, independence, and with many Gen Eds cleared out leaving time and space for the important classes in your chosen field. I would look at this kind of candidate much more closely. Plus, if your degree doesn't get you a job right away after college (this is a reality: read the newspapers every day), you can rely on your TRADE to provide income so you can continue to keep debt low, retirement contributions flowing, and keep a positive income flow.
I did everything wrong. Don't make my mistakes: go to school cheap, make the most of it, find a few passions and stick with them, and focus your energy to be a balanced candidate instead of relying on Street Cred of a big name to carry you through life.
What you do, what you learn, how you apply it, how you stand out is important. I go to medical school with people from the prestigious Ivy League and some who went to some dinky community college. When blinded to their university, I can't tell people apart. Everyone is different.
Life experience >> School Name. Anyone who brings up the name of their training institution (for reasons other than its unique contributions to a very specific field of training, such as going to Iowa State for Agricultural Science), is foolish and smacks of an insecure or unqualified candidate.
Excellent candidates always stand out based on the balance of their collective application, not by banking on the name of an institution. Think about it: is anyone intrinsically qualified just because they paid a bunch of money and went to a place? Is someone a good painter just because they were friends with Picasso?
Moreover, you aren't apparently looking into the economics of higher education and how the ROI is declining for many college degrees. Unless you plan on majoring in something where the substance of the undergraduate degree is actually meaningful and applied towards a post-graduate occupation specifically, many degrees are a waste of precious resources. Prestigious Schools = Expensive Schools = Expensive, useless degrees in some fields. Many, many people will argue with me, although they typically have some invested interest in keeping the status quo, and not generating too much deep inquiry into the relative value of a generic college education in America anymore.
My advice: go to college as CHEAPLY as possible. Find a school that has a program you like, do plenty of interviews, ask tough questions, do plenty of comparisons and contrasts to find pros and cons of each little detail of each program. Little things matter: U of Chicago, for instance, is a great school but the cost of living in Chicago is comparatively higher than some other places, and if you are extremely busy with school, all the culture in the world in the city of Chicago won't mean anything if you're too busy to enjoy it.
Go to community college for awhile and learn a TRADE (electrician, plumbing, carpentry, automotive repair), and use this skill to MAKE MONEY while also getting excellent grades in a few general education courses that would cost thousands at a big name University. Apply in a few years and STAND OUT as an excellent candidate with applied skills, good financial position, life experience, independence, and with many Gen Eds cleared out leaving time and space for the important classes in your chosen field. I would look at this kind of candidate much more closely. Plus, if your degree doesn't get you a job right away after college (this is a reality: read the newspapers every day), you can rely on your TRADE to provide income so you can continue to keep debt low, retirement contributions flowing, and keep a positive income flow.
I did everything wrong. Don't make my mistakes: go to school cheap, make the most of it, find a few passions and stick with them, and focus your energy to be a balanced candidate instead of relying on Street Cred of a big name to carry you through life.
Okay thanks guys. I'll apply to the U of M TC to see if I make it, which I think I will. Sorry if I sounded snobby or something at the beginning of this thread, I thought college reputation was more important than it is.
I have a question though, is there a particular career field where you design stuff? I am artistic, but not artistic enough to become an artist, I am good at basic engineering and mechanical stuff like taking things apart and putting them back together, but not interested in going strictly into engineering, but the thing that makes me really special is everyone thinks I am an extremely creative person in general and have good taste
Is there a career field where you design stuff? The exteriors of laptops/computers, furniture, buildings, electronics, etc.?
I have a question though, is there a particular career field where you design stuff? I am artistic, but not artistic enough to become an artist, I am good at basic engineering and mechanical stuff like taking things apart and putting them back together, but not interested in going strictly into engineering, but the thing that makes me really special is everyone thinks I am an extremely creative person in general and have good taste
Is there a career field where you design stuff? The exteriors of laptops/computers, furniture, buildings, electronics, etc.?
I agree wholeheartedly. I went to WVU thinking of transferring to bigger and better things. I got into a relationship and made tons of friends. Even though I had my transfer approved, I had too many friends and a great girlfriend (at the time) that I would have left behind.
Believe me, that's not a decision you want to be faced with. I stayed and I don't regret it one bit.
But, YES, GET INVOLVED. Don't be the "guy down the hallway" that sits in his room all day and studies. Be social, come out of your shell, go out with people you don't know. You'll be a better person for it.
Intermural sports are GREAT! If you're not athletically inclined, do something like frisbee or kickball. If you're into a mainstream sport, join the club team. It doesn't matter if you are good or not, you'll still make friends, even if you ride the bench.
College is the time where you really learn who you are. So, act on your interests and you'll meet plenty of other people that you'll have something in common with.
I, like you, spent a lot of time worrying about what college I got into, but I can honestly say, I'm glad I didn't get accepted straight out of high school into my dream schools. Blessing in disguise.
Something you should do after you get into school is go to the schools career center and they will often give you a test to help figure things out for you.
I learned about it way to late at Texas Tech but I did take it my last semester for a class and it gets some really interesting results. The test is consider very accurate. It is 90% accurate 2 years out and 50% accurate for life time. That means the info that test kicks out will still hold fair amount of it true life time.
It took me about an hour or 2 to take the test but I did end up using it after I lost my job to help me pick my new field of study.
Go their your first year since your freshman year you mostly are taking core class any ways and very limited major classes and those that you do take they transfer fairly easy to other majors.
Just make sure you do it before you hit the majors bottle neck class. For example in Civil Engineering when you graduated was based on when ever you took statics and it was 2 year min from when you took that class. Almost every major has one of those classes you take your sophomore year.
Sum it up go to your career center and talk to them. They will give you a test and then talk with you about the results. This will help you figure out if and what major to change 2.
Pay attention to Xfujinon, MattSepeta, and puma1552. They know what they are talking about. In my experience, the further away you get from home, the more prestigious your school becomes. I graduated from Purdue and Penn State - Both state schools and Big Ten - just like U of Minnesota!
I always give this advice. Get involved in two to three clubs (no more - you have classes, you know!). One should be your major (Engineering Society, Design Club, etc.) and another should be something to keep you active (I took up scuba diving and racquetball).
As far as majors, you might want to look into something like Purdue's School of Technology - Kind of like engineering, but less theory and more hands on. Not sure how many schools have degrees like that.
I always give this advice. Get involved in two to three clubs (no more - you have classes, you know!). One should be your major (Engineering Society, Design Club, etc.) and another should be something to keep you active (I took up scuba diving and racquetball).
As far as majors, you might want to look into something like Purdue's School of Technology - Kind of like engineering, but less theory and more hands on. Not sure how many schools have degrees like that.
At the very least, you can start the applications! The Common Application opened up on August 1st. However, I'm not sure what the state schools in Minnesota take...
Also, this thread makes me hopeless about what college I'll get into (no Amherst I'm guessing)...
Good luck TSE!
Also, this thread makes me hopeless about what college I'll get into (no Amherst I'm guessing)...
Good luck TSE!
Much truth here.
Unless you're going into a highly competitive field, like law or pre-med, it's really only going to matter that you finished the program; not where you took the program.
The engineers I work with have degrees from all over, and some don't even have degrees (they climb the economic ladder more slowly). You'll do fine as long as you finish the program and graduate.
Good question. There are many types of design; I'm an engineer, and my primary job function is design, but I couldn't tell you how to take something apart and put it back together to save my life. Engineering is about problem solving; someone has a problem, you design something to solve that problem. You also mentioned more artistic design, like furniture, etc. Even things like that, if there's any functionality to it, there's going to be a bit of technical know-how going into the design. So engineering really isn't all that far-fetched for some of the things you mentioned designing.
Much truth here.
Unless you're going into a highly competitive field, like law or pre-med, it's really only going to matter that you finished the program; not where you took the program.
The engineers I work with have degrees from all over, and some don't even have degrees (they climb the economic ladder more slowly). You'll do fine as long as you finish the program and graduate.
What you quoted goes double to triple for your ungraded.
Your ACT is decent depending upon what school you'd like to go to. Not sure what the schools you like are looking for, but you could get into WVU with that no problem. The only problem is your GPA. Being in the top 10% is key.