[Redrum]

Actually I think it was a bit less the year I transferred in.  I still don't know why I got in and others didn't.  (See the movie Brazil with Michael Palin and the intersection of the insect /mechanical worlds that starts it in motion.)  Makes about the same amount of sense to me.  Stanford now takes dramatically fewer transfers,  but back then they simply treated arriving transfers as afterthoughts... a way to compensate for their mistake in letting you in.  Decades later I am still baffled as to why I was more qualified than other applicants.  Not particularly gifted, all I did was grind at a community college while all my HS friends went off on the college freshman adventure.    What I didn't know was that in that same transfer cohort (we never really met in a "group") was a transfer from CalTech,  who had been going to school there in Pasadena at the same time  I was at the CC only a mile away.    We bonded at Stanford in Germany and he remains my best friend to this day.  The only catch is he has season Stanford football tickets and I have to pirate my Stanford football broadcasts from the Central Time Zone. 

I was lucky and remain thankful for my Stanford experience, but still disapprove of how Stanford -- so obsessed with freshman "integration" into campus and intellectual life--managed to screw up the integration of transfers.  I got better orientation and assistance at the community college.  Of course, this was waaay "back in the day."  Maybe the treatment and integration of transfers got better with time, but in the current Stanford sellers market,  maybe making transfers near non-existent is a more cost effective way of solving the problem.

[Redrum]

Actually I think it was a bit less the year I transferred in.  I still don't know why I got in and others didn't.  (See the movie Brazil with Michael Palin and the intersection of the insect /mechanical worlds that starts it in motion.)  Makes about the same amount of sense to me.  Stanford now takes dramatically fewer transfers,  but back then they simply treated arriving transfers as afterthoughts... a way to compensate for their mistake in letting you in.  Decades later I am still baffled as to why I was more qualified than other applicants.  Not particularly gifted, all I did was grind at a community college while all my HS friends went off on the college freshman adventure.    What I didn't know was that in that same transfer cohort (we never really met in a "group") was a transfer from CalTech,  who had been going to school there in Pasadena at the same time  I was at the CC only a mile away.    We bonded at Stanford in Germany and he remains my best friend to this day.  The only catch is he has season Stanford football tickets and I have to pirate my Stanford football broadcasts from the Central Time Zone. 

I was lucky and remain thankful for my Stanford experience, but still disapprove of how Stanford -- so obsessed with freshman "integration" into campus and intellectual life--managed to screw up the integration of transfers.  I got better orientation and assistance at the community college.  Of course, this was waaay "back in the day."  Maybe the treatment and integration of transfers got better with time, but in the current Stanford sellers market,  maybe making transfers near non-existent is a more cost effective way of solving the problem.