Pitzer College is a small liberal arts school located in Claremont, California, and it’s a part of the Claremont Colleges – a unique consortium of 5 undergrad colleges that share resources and a campus, but each school kinda has their own flavor. Pitzer is known for the social sciences, behavioral sciences, international programs, and media studies. It’s also a really progressive school with a huge social justice focus.
Pitzer’s first-year acceptance rate hovers in the low 20s, and their transfer acceptance rate is 10%. To put it simply: 230 people applied last cycle, and only 23 were admitted. That isn’t a lot of spots! This means you need to be on your A-game and create an application that sets you apart from the small, yet talented, applicant pool. Let’s talk about what you need to do:
Pitzer’s Requirements
To be eligible for transfer, here’s what Pitzer says they want from you:
“A transfer applicant must have earned a high school diploma or GED and completed one or more semesters or two or more quarters of college credit by the application deadline. Students that are currently completing their first semester or second quarter of college are not yet eligible for our transfer process”
Essentially, freshmen in college are not eligible to transfer to Pitzer, you must be a sophomore to throw out an application. This is pretty unique! You can also transfer up to 64 credits (also unique!)
Here are their other requirements:
Transfer Common App
Essays (more on that later)
One faculty recommendation (can be professor or TA)
School/College report
Official Transcripts (college + high school)
And you also get an optional interview, which you should absolutely take advantage of. This is not often offered to transfer applicants.
More on their requirements and process for transfer applicants here.
Pick the Right Classes
Pitzer is a liberal arts school, so while yes, you need to take classes in your niche (let’s use their most popular major, experimental psych, as an example), you also need to take a variety of classes. They say so themselves: “Students transferring from two-year colleges before completion of an Associates degree are strongly recommended to take courses from a broad range of subjects including the humanities, math, social science and science.” Yes, that’s just about Community Colleges, but it’s good advice! This is also good advice in case your transfer dreams don’t become a reality, as you’ll have a lot of your core classes under your belt.
However, for your major, you should take things that fit into your niche. If you want to do experimental psych, taking basic psych classes probably won’t cut it.
Get Really Good Grades
Pitzer cares about grades! Hear it from the horse’s mouth:
“The Admission Committee will pay particular attention to work done in college courses.”
This means you need to do really well in your classes. One way to help you with this is maybe don’t take classes you absolutely hate and don’t take classes you really struggled with in high school. If you need them for your major, try to put them off until you get to Pitzer, tbh. There is no need to suffer through OChem if you almost failed Chemistry in high school, that is not a set up for success!!
And btw, go to office hours. That’s an order. Not only does this help your grades (and build some community in case you don’t transfer), but it’ll help when you need to ask for rec letters.
Develop Your Niche
You need more than just classes to prove you want to study (to keep with our example) experimental psych. There are lots of ways to get plugged in, including but not limited to:
Research with a professor
Joining (or starting) clubs
Writing for an on-campus publication on the topic of psych
Getting an internship
Plugging into your school community isn’t just good for your resume, it’s good for building experience AND as a safety net in case transferring doesn’t go your way.
Write Good Essays
Pitzer has two essays, both of which are pretty standard college essay fare.
As a mission-driven institution, we value and celebrate the synergy created by our differences and similarities. We welcome you to write about distinctive aspects of your background, identity, or personal interests that you would bring to Pitzer, and how you plan to engage in our community. (1,500 character limit, about 250 words)
Okay, side note, we hate that the transfer Common App uses characters and not word count. It is sooooo annoying. Honestly, once we finish writing this, we’re emailing Common App. It’s so dumb.
Moving on: this is a community essay. Pitzer is a funky, social-justice-minded school, so your essay should be a) a creatively written story and b) a story that shows you’ll mesh well with their culture. If you’re dying to write about how you organized a March for Life protest at your school, Pitzer is not gonna be your spot. Remember, you’ll want to tie it back to an activity or group at Pitzer. This is a prompt they also added in response to the Supreme Court decision on Affirmative Action for all applicants last cycle, and we wrote about how to write it here. If you’re straight, cis, and able-bodied, don’t write about that.
The next essay has an interesting prelude:
“Using AI language models like ChatGPT to generate essays or personal statements for college applications is considered unethical and violates our expectations of academic integrity. It is important for applicants to submit original work that authentically reflects their thoughts, experiences, and abilities.”
No ChatGPT for y’all! Not that you should be using it anyway!
Find out more about our core values. Please choose from the following prompts and answer below (Limit to 4,000 characters (about 650 words):
● Reflecting on your involvement throughout school or within the community, how have you engaged with one of Pitzer’s core values?
● Describe what you are looking for from your college experience and why Pitzer would be a good fit for you.
*shakes fist* Character counts
Moving on. If this were us, we would probably choose #2 or if we chose number #1, we’d focus on the core value of “Interdisciplinary Learning.” This is because your first essay question should touch on aspects of community (weaved in with identity), so your second question should focus on what matters when it comes to college: the college of it all.
Essentially, it’s a why essay. These are also prompts they ask first-year students, which we have a detailed guide for.
We hope these tips help you a) prepare to transfer and b) make that transfer application happen. Good luck on your Pitzer application and make sure to keep your grades up, get plugged into your community, and dive into your passions.
If you need help with your transfer applications, reach out to us today.