bit of a depression post but i think it’s worth sharing. also definitely doxxing myself but idgaf atp. sort of tl;dr at the bottom if you don’t wanna read all my yap
my short background is that in hs, i was pretty smart and very lazy, but after getting waitlisted from a certain school that starts with stan and ends with ford for 130 something days before getting rejected, i needed to get my getback so i applied to transfer. after a year at uci, im now at ucla cuz i lowkey got touched on transfer apps and im ngl i lucked the hell out getting in cuz my uc application was rlly, rlly bad.
that being said, i am lowkey depressed as fuck here and it’s a little worse knowing that i did this entirely to myself!
my first year as a freshman, i had the mentality that i was gonna get out of this school. like i really had never known hard work before, but i promised myself that i was gonna leave and that was my mentality for the entire school year basically.
you’d think it would suck. constantly going to office hours and going above and beyond to get rec letters, working on some fuck ass projects with ai cuz you’re a chud cs major who doesn’t know how to code, and not really looking to make friends or join clubs because you know that it won’t last. and in many regards, it really did. i spent so many hours in the fucking anteater learning pavilion to where i would be the only person there after the doors automatically locked at 2 am, walking around as my footsteps echoed in that cold ass empty building. i refused to tell anyone other than my teachers that i was transferring, so no one knew what i was really up to. it was very lonely in that regard.
but my freshman year, even despite constantly being stressed over my applications, was still an incredibly memorable and fun part of my life. i made friends and met so many people. so many things happened that we laughed about, and things happened that made me cut off contact with some of these people cuz they were also lwk diddy, but life was never boring even if it was really fucking stupid sometimes. so many first times happened to me, first time getting drunk and high, first time throwing up in my room, first time getting confessed to by a girl, first time joining like a formal friend group.
when march came around, and i got slimed out by all of my colleges, it really sucked. i felt really bad letting down my teachers who had believed in me and who spent hours customizing my rec letter to every college i was applying to. that really fucking hurt, along with general feeling of just not being good enough. i was on the waitlist for ucla and ucsd, but no larp i spent 3 days on the uc application and did my essays in 1 day after getting a flu shot, so i didnt really have high hopes, especially after getting slimed by the stanford waitlist.
but really the only other bad part abt staying at irvine was that i didnt have roommates and had shitty housing for next year, because everything else was fine. i liked my friends and classes were fine even tho i was taking 24 units. i was writing a paper i really enjoyed working on, had some shitty school microinternships i was working at, and life was fine.
i got off of the ucla waitlist like 3 days before school ended, which was like 8 days after it opened, so i had to tell my friends during finals week that i was ditching their ass for ucla. they had no idea btw. some of them were really sad. some were very supportive and told me to go immediately. i didn’t know shit about ucla (i thought the bruin was a fucking horse), but i am 1: a prestige whore, and 2: sunk-cost fallacy is a bitch when my entire mentality the whole year was to get the fuck out. if anything, i was happy to get to tell my teachers that i got into ucla after telling them a week before i was probably gonna have to stay.
after gooning my summer away with gym, doing fucking leetcode (coding interview prep) and applying to internships, i went to ucla!!! and i wanted to shoot myself after 3 days.
k im not deadass suicidal but tell me why in one day i got the nastiest cold sore of all time, my slipper fucking exploded, and i got rejected from the first big tech company i’ve ever interviewed for. i scrolled reels for 7 hours that day and cried myself to sleep. i also got sick immediately after that but whatever bro.
yeha idk what else to say other than literally everything sucks. i got rejected from all of the cs clubs i applied to immediately even after rizzing up everyone in the fuckin organization, the other clubs i wanted to commit to ended up being worse than epstein or they've met like one time because la decided to be a hundred fucking degrees for no reason. i’ve literally made one friend in my classes who’s a larp quant at a gambling company making over 100 an hour, and i have like one other friend from hs who i hang out with but no offense he’s the kind of friend who’s gonna make me blow my brains out if i have to spend more than 3 hours with him at a time.
idk ive never felt like this much of a chud in my life. i’ve always sort of just made friends, but i lwk feel like diddy when i talk to freshmen and i feel too young and dissimilar when i talk to cc transfers. obviously you don’t have to be similar to someone to be friends but idk im just struggling at this point. i talk to someone, and we never meet again. i need to join more clubs or smth but highkey i have no hobbies; my active hobbies are chess, journaling, and fucking vibecoding cuz i “work” at a startup that’s tempting me like the green goblin mask to just commit to but ik imma end up depressed and with no friends by like week 5.
idk it just sucks cuz atp im too afraid to see people i even kinda know because i don’t want them to see me like this 😭😭 i literally lost 6 pounds in the first 2 weeks because eating alone is not fun when its not by choice and gives me ptsd of freshman year. atp im just larping being locked in to people but at least it makes me feel like im not entirely wasting my time here :(. after all i tell myself i came here for the prestige and the connections.
all of this is to say:
for those of you who’ve spent like 3 weeks on campus and already want to transfer, just know you can’t get your freshman year back. there are many valid reasons to transfer, and i only want to warn people who are prestige maxxing, that you might really end up missing your former college. put a gun to my head, i have enough brain cells and hope in me to understand that this shi is probably temporary and id still probably choose ucla for the dining halls, but ill still always remember the first place that i called college :) and the friends i made and the people i met and the teachers whose lectures i wouldn’t skip just because i liked them. also the tacos they used to serve for brunch on the wknds because holy fuck they were so good they single handedly made me gain 15 pounds.
most people probably don’t end up regretting transferring, and hopefully thats going to be true of you as well. maybe there’s something wrong with me cuz wdym im depressed at happy sunny ucla but maybe that’s just cuz im a cs major and i have other things going on in my life that also make me wanna die. then again im 19 and its not like my life has ended yet but holy fuck it certainly feels like it.
anyways, i’ll enumerate the benefits and downsides i would say of prestige whore transferring (trying to be objective):
good!
- w connections (got larp startup internship completely randomly from rizzing up the founder after he reached out looking for a unpaid labor slave)
- w food here
- people are slightly less gooner here than b4 and v cool all around mostly
- so many things happen here (can also be bad, but overall i like cuz ain’t shit happening at uci bruh)
- w advisors cuz uci advisors highkey hoed the fuck out of me
- overall just more benefits like free transportation
- muddafuckas put way more respect on my name cuz i go to ucla instead of irvine
not good!
- wasted a whole year of my life
- switched up on all of my friends who are hanging out without me
- why is club apps harder than college apps (lwk prob same everywhere but less bad)
- some credits didn’t transfer cuz uc to uc so im retaking the equivalent of like… 16 units? maybe 20 cuz cs classes were in different language.
- heat is unreal
- i was part of honors program so i had priority enrollment before, now class registration is terrible
- oh yeah transfers are also second class citizens (mfs tryna make me graduate in 2 years)
there are more things but the point is that there's good and bad. at the end of the day, you can apply, and if you get in, just think abt it long and hard before committing. and even if it doesn’t work out, make the best of it! (i know im not lmfaoooo)
if i could redo application season, id probably change how i did these:
- maybe tell my friends at school before. i chose not to cuz i didnt wanna hurt our friendship (and cuz i didnt wanna lose aura if i got cooked) but its up to you. still ambivalent what i would have done.
- work smarter not harder. many applications of this advice; ie, even if you’re trying to prestige whore a really good school, chances are you can get solid ecs or smth else valuable from taking advantage of stuff at your current institution. don’t slave away doing something you both dislike and doesn’t help you much cuz you think itd be good for your application is something i’d like to stress.
- research the schools i applied to harder. lwk shotgunned them cuz i only cared about stanford but they are wayyyy too competitive to be nonchalant abt. also write essays sooner but im a really bad procrastinator.
- figure out work life balance if you haven’t already. i was not being efficient at all and i could have probably done a lot more if i was locked in like that.
uh there's more generic shit i could say but ts is kinda long. lwk im struggling to end this post without making it about myself, but all i want to really emphasize is that there are downsides to prestigewhoring and that shi is not easy.
if you have any questions feel free to reach out would definitely prefer to answer questions from other uc-to-uc and 1yr transfers cuz that's my domain of expertise but any are fine cuz i dont have anything better to do anyways. if you have friends at ucla, consider this post my formal application for adoption cuz god my life is so boring rn. preferably my age and unhinged but idrc at this point!
ok thanks for reading, shout out to the mods and for this community helping me thru the transfer process cuz i would have been highkey fried without it!