Can you reach out to an advisor before applying for a transfer?

You can try. I did and my future advisor was very helpful. It really depends on the advisor’s personality and their caseload.

Also, did you check if there is a transfer credit database? My understanding is most schools have one. That way you can start checking on your own. You can cross check this against the plan of study (ie requirements) for your major to get an idea. This will be imprecise since some majors do have some requirements on what classes they allow to transfer (so even if the school accepts it your major may not) and schools do require a certain amount of credits (maybe even specific ones) that need to be taken at the university. That’s why emailing an advisor is a good idea, but it’s also to say you can get some idea by yourself before (or if they don’t) reply.

If you’d like, here’s a walkthrough of how I would do this for a random school and major (not mine). Here is the transfer credit database. Say I took MATH201 at cc, my results are these after putting it into the database. I get MA16010 that transfers. Now say I’m an economics major. I go to the course plan of study I find online and see if MA16010 counts towards my degree. It does, so I know I should earn those credits. And then I can do the same with another class. This is all hypothetical to help illustrate how this might work.

/r/college Thread