Let's Talk about the High School Transcript

We noticed that towards the end of our spring semester review, we were requesting/pleading for the high school transcript or GED(yes, we'll accept it) from a lot of students who had done a great job of submitting the application and college transcript(s).  

We do require high school transcripts or the GED.

If you're planning on applying for Fall 2012 and you're home for winter break, get a jumpstart on gathering materials and request or collect your transcript from your high school.  If you completed a GED, order your official score report now.  You can hold onto until you apply or you can send it to us ahead of your application. We'll match things up as we get them.  You'll be able to mark it off your list early and not have to worry about it when you're juggling the application process, mid-terms and other things life throws our way. :)

Rollover Process

If you were not admitted for Spring 2012, there is a possibility that you can "roll over" your application for Fall.  You found some limited instructions on this in your electronic letter.  If you would like to be considered, please email undergradadmission@virginia.edu or send us a letter.   Email is faster, so I would recommend going that route.  When you write, put the word "rollover" somewhere in the subject line.   If you would like to switch schools (Commerce, Engineering, Architecture), please include that wish in your letter as well.

Students who are not eligible for rollover are current juniors attending a four-year university.  Unfortunately, these students are no longer eligible for transfer.  Please check out the main UVA website for information on our graduate programs.

Decisions will be released around May 1 for any rollover student who added to the Fall process.

**Most importantly, you need to send your updated college transcript including your Fall 2011 grades when they become available.  These will be due by March 1, 2012**

Spring 2012 Transfer Decisions

Hi everyone!  Sorry to have disappeared for so long.  The spring transfer process coupled with early action
for high school applicants is keeping us very busy.

All transfer decisions will be posted online this evening at 5PM EST.  Remember that you have to consult your SIS account to get your decision. You'll have information about this in your UVA confirmation email. We will post all decisions online, but we will only be mailing letters to admitted students.  A student is either offered or not offered.  There is no waitlist process for spring admission.

Do not call the office to ask for your decision.  We do not give out decisions over the phone. To get to your account, go here and click on the "SIS Login."   If you don't remember your account information, seek out the help information on the left-hand side of that same page. 

Good luck! 

Transfer Open House

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we will have an transfer open house on Friday, November 11. We would greatly appreciate if you would register and you can do that here: https://virginia-uga.edu.185r.net/Event/
Make sure you click "Transfer" and that will give you the option to register for the Nov 11 session that starts in Maury Hall, Room 209.

The program will have three parts:
10:00am -10:45am: Transfer Information Session (tentative student panel planned)
10:45am - Noon: Walking Tour of Grounds
12:15pm - 1:00pm: Individual School Sessions

In the individual school sessions, you'll have the ability to visit the Architecture, Engineering, Education and Commerce schools. A session for the College of Arts and Sciences will take place in Maury Hall as well.

We encourage you to have lunch on grounds and visit classes on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. Check out the Open Class List for a listing of available courses.

We hope you can join us :)

More VCCS Visits

We will be attending fairs at various Virginia community colleges and high schools until the end of the month on what's called the Virginia Tour. Please check with your counselors.  Some of the NVCC fairs are this week, so keep your eyes peeled.  We'll be making non-fair visits during the dates and times below.

NVCC- Loudoun - 10/12/11 from 10-4pm
GCC - Fredericksburg - 10/25/11 from 11-2

For more information and sign-ups for these, please contact the school's transfer offices.

Spring Deadline is Approaching

As many of you know, the spring (January admission) deadline is October 1, 2011. Let's go over the basics.

-We only take students in January who are entering the College of Arts and Sciences and the Architectural History program.  We want to admit students who truly want to matriculate and graduate from these programs.  This is not a back door for the Commerce School, Engineering School and the like.
- The application is online at www.commonapp.org.  Yes, there are essays, but I promise you that they are not difficult to answer. Take the time to really think about why you are applying to UVA and go with that.
-In order to do our review, we require the high school transcript/GED, the college transcript and standardized testing (SAT or ACT). For applicants who have been out of high school for more than five years, we will allow you to apply without the SAT or ACT. For applicants whose second language is English, we require the TOEFL exam.  The deadline to mail these materials is a postmark deadline.
-UVA is a selective institution.  We require these parts in order to admit the most qualified and best prepared students no matter your age or where you are in your education. These requirements are on our website and they were required long before the internet.
-On the right panel of this blog, you'll see tips on the forms offered to you by the common app.  We do not require any of these, but see the right panel for more info.
-Unfortunately, we are only able to admit about 10-15% of the students who apply for January. If you don't gain admission at that time, and you are not a college junior at this time, you will likely be eligible to apply again for fall, where we admit 35-40% of applicants.

Transfer Open House

The next transfer open house will be on November 11. We are working on the details, but we hope you can join us. Plan to visit us for most of the day. Registration and schedules will be available soon.

Community College Visits

Representatives from our office will be visiting a small number of community colleges next week. If you are interested in coming to meet with us and discuss the ins and outs of transfer admission, contact your transfer counselor or student/academic services office for details.

NVCC - Manassas -- Tuesday, September 6 - 10am-2pm
NVCC - Annandale -- Wednesday, September 7 - 9am - 6pm
NVCC - Alexandria -- Thursday, September 8 - 9am-6pm

We'll be visiting other campuses later in the fall.
Stay tuned for those details and information on a transfer open house here in Charlottesville.

The Common Application is Completely Live!

Hello everyone!

I hope you had a safe and happy summer. I want to welcome any new readers to the blog. Thanks for stopping by to see us.

Some of you may have noticed that there was a hang-up with the supplement. That has been fixed and the ENTIRE application is now live. Once again, the deadline for the spring application will now be October 1. We hope to release decisions in mid-late November, but that notification date is tentative.

With the spring process, we only take applications for the College of Arts and Sciences and the Architectural History major. Typically, 300 or students apply and we will make offers to about 40 students. It is very competitive for spring, but if you are not admitted and still eligible for transfer, you may apply for the following fall.

Best of luck with the start of the school year! See you on the blog again soon!

The Transfer Class is Complete

We made our final transfer offers yesterday and with that, the fall process for transfer is complete. I know it has been a long wait. On the bright side, we finished up three weeks earlier than we did last year. Imagine that wait.

Today, we will email all students remaining on the wait list. In an effort to be environmentally friendly, we will not be mailing letters.

I know this may be disappointing news, but hopefully it takes you out of limbo and will allow for clarity going forward. Like I said in a post a couple of weeks ago, soon we'll start looking towards the spring 2012 process.

Thank you for asking great questions, cheering each other on and generally being cool as cucumbers. Believe me when I tell you that those characteristics made it very easy to communicate with you over the course of the year.

Wait List Update #3

We released a few more decisions this afternoon. Some for the College of Arts and Sciences and a few for nursing. At this point, all wait lists are still open, but we are coming towards the end of the wait. Again, I'll let you know when all lists are officially closed.
Later this summer, we'll start the conversation about spring transfer. The (new)October 1 deadline is less than four months away.
P.S. Thank you for your genuine and positive comments these last few weeks. You guys are great.

Wait List Update #2

Adam beat me to it. The time has come. We are making offers from the wait list today. These students will be emailed. We've offered to about 50 students. Most are Virginians because we were lacking in that area. Some from Commerce, but most have come from the College of Arts and Sciences. This is our first "wave" with the wait list. We may offer to more, we may not offer to more. But, I will announce it here when everything is closed. This will likely be at the end of the month, but only time will tell. I'll update when I have more information.

Waiting List Update

Thanks all for being patient. Our staff has been traveling for work and letting the numbers come in and settle. We likely won't move to the waitlist until the end of the month.

Here comes the hard part. Our yield was almost spot on for Commerce, Nursing, and Engineering. This means we won't be making many offers for these schools.

We will be making a good number of offers for the College of Arts and Sciences. The reason for this is that it's our largest school and even though the majority of applicants apply here, the process just allows us room to budge. Remember that the list is not ranked. We will just go in and review these students again from now until probably middle and late June.

Like I said in the past, close to 400 students have elected to stay on the wait list. We will make offers to about 40-50 students, the majority of them coming from the College of Arts and Sciences.

If you are on the waitlist, please, please mail your official final grades when they become available. If you are reading this and you were not offered admission or the waitlist, there is no need to send grades.

I will give you updates when I have new information. Thanks again for being so patient.

Answers

Hello Readers,

Now that the dust has settled a bit, I am going to attempt to answer your general questions from the last five days or so. I encourage you do research on the school’s various websites and these will give you answers to more personal questions. Some questions were answered by fellow bloggers. I think giving this post some type of structure will be most helpful to you.

Decisions

If you have a question about your decision, you may call our office. Please know that we do not have an appeals process, but if you would like to know more, it might help you understand the process. It’s just that under no circumstances do we change decisions. The bottom line is that you must remember that this is not a reflection of the person that you are. This is a review of your academic and educational profile, not you in a personal sense.

Wait list

Per usual, most of our phone calls come from waitlisted students.

-You want to know what’s next and how to improve your chances of getting in off the wait list. As I said before, you want to click the button to remain on the list. After you click it once, it should work. The reason why it stays there is in the event that turn down the offer of the waitlist.

-Please send us your final semester grades. If they won’t be released until late in this process, send us your quarter grades or mid-semester grades. You may also send us a continued letter/email of interest written by you, and lastly, you may send an additional letter of recommendation.

-We won’t know how many students we’ll be able to take off the wait list until the deposits are in around May 15^th. I will announce it here when we move to the wait list.

-The wait list is not ranked.

-You likely will not hear from us before you have to deposit elsewhere. Please make sure you have somewhere to go by putting down that deposit.

Deposit

The deposit is due by midnight on May 15. Please disable your pop-up blockers. This should help. The moment you deposit, you will be asked to submit your Final Transcript. If you don’t submit this, your courses won’t be evaluated by your school by the time orientation rolls around, or worse yet, you won’t be able to attend courses in the Fall. There is no one rule about the grades we expect to see after the spring semester, but we would hope that your strong grades would continue this semester. If you receive weak grades, please write to us and let us know. It's better for you to take the initiative in this situation.

You should already have your SIS ID number. It will take 48-72 hours for the deposit to go through the system.

Financial Aid Awards

Student Financial Services started posting preliminary awards yesterday. They will continue to work on these as files become complete. Again, please keep checking your to-do list to see if they need additional paperwork. They tend to ask for a lot, but it's all to get an accurate picture of what we can give you and what you owe.

Stats

You'll find some general stats in the post below this one.

I believe McIntire was slightly less competitive because we had fewer applications, but the admit rate was still 17%.

We do not have Days on the Lawn or Admitted Students Days for transfers. You are welcome to visit keeping in mind that it is time for final exam and the University will be abuzz with studious studiers.

Housing

There are many options for transfer who want to live on-grounds. For more information see the Housing Division’s website here: www.virginia.edu/housing. For those who pay the deposit, you'll soon get an email from the Dean of Students about our specific transfer housing community.

Evaluating Credits

Once you deposit, we'll wait for your final transcript. Transcripts are evaluated by the individual schools. The information will be released in late May, but mostly June. In order to get an idea of what would transfer, please check out the transfer credit analyzer found here.

Orientation

Orientation has a great website with lots and lots of helpful information. www.virginia.edu/orientation

Course Registration

Course registration doesn't technically occur until summer orientation. The schools need time to evaluation your transcripts. Transfers go through this every year. First-year and transfer orientation happens concurrently. It can be slightly bumpy getting into courses during your first semester of transfer, but if you declare a major at orientation/you're an incoming 3rd year, you'll have pull as far as getting in off of waiting lists goes. If you don't get into it the first time around(I'm looking at you 2nd years), the great thing about UVA, is that it will probably be offered again at another time.

Taking Stock

Hello everyone,

I will attempt to answer important questions today and tomorrow. With over 100 comments and normal work that we have to do, this will take some time.

A couple of notes: Please do not email or call the schools or Deans of schools to ask about your application. We handle application questions here in admissions. If there's something we can't answer, we'll check it out for you. If you are not contacting an admissions dean, you are not contacting the right party.

If you have been admitted, please check your SIS To-Do List to make sure all financial aid documents are submitted. It's REALLY important that you get these in ASAP.

All told, this is still a selective process. We are looking to see if you've been successful where you are and if you'll do well here at UVA, be it academically or as a contributor to the community. Of the 2300 that applied, about 400 students are on the wait list. About 31% of all applicants were admitted - that's 36% of Virginians and 24% of non-Virginians.


Stay tuned for answers to the comments posted over the weekend...

Waitlisted for Fall 2011?

You may use this entry as a place to post comments or questions about the wait list.

If you are still interested in us, please make sure you click the button (on your self-service page) that indicates that you want to “remain on the wait list.” If you don’t do this, you will not be reviewed again in the future.

After the deposit deadline of May 15, we’ll begin to look to see how many students we can take off the wait list. This varies from year-to-year and can be a long process. We hope to make our decisions by mid-June, but this is a moving target and I will keep you updated.

Most importantly, we will need to see your Spring 2011 grades in order to make these decisions. After final exams are completed and your grades are finalized, please make sure you mail us your official transcript. Our address is University of Virginia, Office of Admission, P.O. Box 400160, Charlottesville, VA 22904.

Not Offered Admission?

This is the hardest part of it all. You’ve worked so hard and unfortunately, we’re not able to admit all of our great applicants. Please be polite and considerate of others’ feelings in your commentary if you must write here. You all have been very supportive of each other and I assume you’ll continue that attitude here.

Offered Transfer Admission?

Every year, we create a forum for you to leave your comments in three different places. This streamlines the process in seeing comments and answering questions. Please be respectful of your fellow commenters and UVA. Per usual, I will delete any comments if necessary.

**Feel free to ask questions here if you’ve been offered admission.**

Your status page is self-explanatory. Just below your “letter” are buttons to accept or decline our offer to you. If you accept, you’ll then be instructed to pay the $400 deposit. Clicking only “YES” will not secure your spot in the class. You will need to pay as well. You can pay with a credit card(we don’t accept VISA) or with and e-check. You’ll have until May 15 to put down your deposit. If you decide not to come to UVA, please decline our offer in the same spot. This will help us in our next phase. I will address questions about housing, orientation, financial aid and credit evaluation next week.

Offer letters will go out Monday and Tuesday of next week.

Decisions will be released online on Friday(4/29/11) at 5pm

Many of your suspicions were correct and while we are still working, we'll be ready to release decisions online tomorrow at 5pm.

DO NOT CALL THE OFFICE ASKING FOR A DECISION. We will not give it to you.

As you read in my last post, in an effort to be environmentally conscious, we will only be mailing welcome packets to admitted students. Again, everyone should be able to see their decisions online, meaning your online account. We don't email decisions.

The place to go is here where you would next click on SIS Login on the left hand side. Again, using your UVA Computing ID and Password will get you into your self-service account.

If you can't remember this information, please contact our help desk at 4help@virginia.edu. We, in the office of admission cannot help you with this issue. You can also call them at (434) 924-HELP. They are available 24 hours a day.

Regarding Financial Aid: For a few weeks, Student Financial Services has been working with what they've received from all applicants. They plan to release financial aid information beginning Tuesday of next week. Check your to-do lists to see if anything is missing. If there is something amiss, please follow directions to get it to them as soon as possible.

Good luck to everyone!

Email coming to you

Readers,

Thank you for bringing up the strange email you may have received yesterday. We got some phone calls about it as well. That email was directed towards first-year students. NEW: We sincerely apologize for the confusion surrounding the initial email. You should receive a follow-up email tomorrow(4/22). Here are the contents of that message:

Dear Student,

Thank you for applying to the University of Virginia as a transfer student. We are quickly approaching the decision release date. In order to access your decision, you will need to be able to log into your Student Self-Service account. If you have not yet logged in or have questions about logging in, please contact the UVA Help Desk in the upcoming days. The Help Desk is available 24 hours a day by calling 434-924-4357. In an effort to be more environmentally friendly, we will only mail welcome packets to admitted students.

If you received an email yesterday suggesting that the May 1^st deadline is approaching for deposit, please disregard that message and accept our apologies for the confusion. That message was designed for our first year applicants whose deposit deadline is approaching, but it seems that some of our transfer applicants may have received the message as well.

After transfer decisions are released, admits will have about two weeks to deposit, and I can guarantee that your deadline, yes, you transfer applicant reading this, will not be May 1st.