Before you actually apply for transfer admission, you’ll be making decisions about which college-level courses to take – either while you are in high school or at a college or university that you attend before UT Austin. Because every college-level course you take may impact your future, you should consider your courses carefully.

• Some majors require applicants to have taken specific courses to be considered for admission. Others require that all 30 hours of transfer coursework be submitted by a special deadline. Be sure to review the Transfer Coursework page to find out whether the majors that you are considering have any specific transfer coursework requirements.
• Before scheduling any courses, consider whether they will prepare you for future study and whether they are likely to transfer to UT Austin. Although it may not be possible to plan perfectly, there are some things you can do to try to make progress in the right direction. Visit the Transfer Resources page to access some resources that can help you to determine whether courses you’ve taken or plan to take are likely to transfer.
• If you’re in high school and planning to take a dual credit course or a course that might result in college credit, select a course that will help you to prepare for future study. Speak to your high school counselor about whether the college you’re planning to take any dual credit coursework in is accredited. And then take courses that you can use to help you to graduate from high school, of course, but that are also likely to prepare you for your college career.

Although GPA isn’t the only thing that matters when your admission decision is made, it does matter a great deal. The only way to make sure that your GPA is what you want it to be is to stay on top of your studies. Your goal should be to keep your GPA as high as possible – because once it’s low, it can be very difficult to pick it back up.

If you make all C’s on twelve hours of coursework, you’ll have a 2.0. If you take twelve more hours the next semester and you make all A’s, your overall GPA will only be a 3.0 – which is usually the minimum we tell applicants to shoot for.

If you’re a good enough student to make A’s, make them early. Believing that you’ll work harder next semester is not a realistic approach to keeping your grades up.

Visit the GPA page for more information about how we use and determine GPA.

Although you may be tempted to rush through the process of applying for admission, remember that the quality of the items you submit can make a difference.

UT Austin uses holistic review when making transfer admission decisions. During review, we consider every item submitted by an applicant and judge the quality of the complete application of each applicant in relation to others in that same group. So the quality of your application may be the thing that makes you stand out from the crowd—and that results in your getting the decision you’re looking for.

The quality of your essays matter – but maybe not in the way you might think. We don’t read your essays to give you a grade – for grammar, spelling, and punctuation, for example. Although those things matter, we’re really looking for your ability to make a point in an easy-to-understand and clearly stated manner.

Here are some suggestions about writing an essay that’s not only accurate but may make your essay the one that stands out among the thousands that are read each year:

• Don’t tell us what you think we want to hear. The university’s essay readers don’t have a perfect essay in mind – as a matter of fact essays that sound like all the rest of them – the essay that is expected – is more likely to be overlooked.
• Be yourself. Show us what makes you unique, how you’ve dealt with issues and problems, what you think about the topic at hand. Good writing teachers tell their students to write about what they know. That’s good advice for college essays, too.
• Use a natural voice and style. Although it’s always important to use proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, diction, etc., don’t write to try to impress anyone. Use words and a style that are appropriate for the topic you’re writing about, for someone your age, and for someone who’s trying to communicate clearly and logically.
• Don’t be overly informal either. Your essay will be read by an adult professional. In almost all cases, you should avoid using words or phrases that you might use when texting someone or on a social networking site.
• Develop your ideas. Although the length of your essay alone technically doesn’t matter, developing your ideas completely does matter. If you can do that in a single page of text, that’s good; but if it takes you three pages or so, that’s all right, too (as long as you’re not just adding words to make your essay longer). It’s not realistic to assume that you can clearly communicate your unique perspective about anything in a short paragraph or two.
• Organize your thoughts. All good writing has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That doesn’t mean you should be formulaic in your writing (this isn’t a high school exit exam), but you should introduce your idea, provide interesting examples and details in support of your idea, and come to some sort of conclusion at the end.
• Don’t respond to the prompt as though you’re answering a question. Again, we don’t have a perfect essay in mind. The prompt is supposed to get your mind churning, to make you want to tell us what you think about something that’s important to you. Your essay is your opportunity to do that.

Take your time as you develop a comprehensive and focused resume to submit with your application. Include activities, awards, and responsibilities that you’ve been involved in during the last five years of your life – during high school and beyond. We want to know what’s important to you and how you’ve lived out your commitments. Visit the Resume page for details.

In the same way that you wouldn’t want to take a test without having some idea about what was going to be on it and what it would be graded on, you shouldn’t apply for admission without first doing some research to find out how we make decisions. Visit the What We Consider page to find out all the details.