Cornell is a member of the elite Ivy League with a trait all its own: a culture and tradition of bringing in transfer students. Whereas Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and the rest of the Ivy League accept as few as a handful of transfers each year, Cornell welcomes 500-600 transfers annually. Transfers are accepted for fall or spring starts (another very rare opportunity at such an elite school), and are from diverse backgrounds including community colleges and two-year schools.
If you are looking into applying to transfer to Cornell, you first need to decide which school or college under the Cornell umbrella you’ll be applying to. This can be a bit confusing for people, so we’ll spell it out more clearly.
Cornell is comprised of a collection of graduate and undergraduate schools and colleges — as a transfer, you’ll be considering the undergraduate ones. If you’re currently at a liberal arts school, the College of Arts and Sciences may be the best fit. But if you are interested in psychology, even if you are currently at a liberal arts school, the human development program in the College of Human Ecology may actually be the best fit. There’s also the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and many more.
Picking the right undergraduate school is crucial because your application will be considered specifically for that school. Pick the wrong one, and you may not get in. Each school also has unique application requirements, so you really can’t jump ahead to the end and then make this decision immediately before pressing submit.
After you’ve selected the college you want to apply to, and reviewed the specific application requirements for your college of choice, you need to work on articulating — in writing — why you want to be at Cornell.
In your essays, Cornell wants to see your intellectual potential, your character, your life outside of school, and why Cornell is the place you need to be. That last part is the most important part. You could be the best student in the world. A former valedictorian and varsity athlete who is getting straight A’s in college, already in positions of leadership, and has a clear idea of what they want to pursue academically and in a future career is great and all, but if you can’t articulate why Cornell is the place for you, none of those matter.
When you’re writing about “why Cornell” for your essays, you need to:
Tell a Story
Pinpoint the Reason(s) for Transfer
Focus on Positive Growth
Communicate Educational and/or Career Objectives
Telling a story may sound unnecessary or even silly, but it’s actually really important. People like stories. We like reading them, we like watching them, and we like hearing them. We like stories a lot more than lists of credentials and successes without a narrative thread. It is critical that when you write about why you want — no, need — to be at Cornell you tell a story that links your academic interest, your extracurricular activities, and what Cornell can offer.
A few years ago, we worked with a student who was looking to get into the hospitality industry. She grew up in and around hotels due to her dad’s job, but hadn’t thought it was the industry for her when she went to college. A year in, she realized that her heart was really in hotel management, which she couldn’t pursue at her college. Cornell is the only Ivy League university with a hospitality program — the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration.
We helped this student tell the story of her upbringing, link it to her grown-up passions and academic pursuits, and communicate why Cornell offers the next chapter she needs. She got in.
For this student, which college at Cornell was right for her was pretty obvious. For you, it may be a bit more complicated. Your next step is to study the Cornell colleges and programs so you will apply to transfer to your best fit.
If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of navigating the transfer process, and want your best chance possible of getting into Cornell, send us an email. We help students like you defy transfer statistics to find their dream school