There are many students who want to apply to USC. Although many are very qualified, there are a few who have GPAs that are not competitive.

We know this because we have countless applicants coming to us during both the freshman and transfer admissions season looking for advice and help.

If you are applying to USC with a low GPA, don’t worry. The world isn’t going to crumble, and all hope is not lost. Sure, USC has a very competitive acceptance rate. However, applying and later getting accepted with a lower than average GPA is not unheard of.

Note: USC is a school that takes academic performance seriously; however, they also take a holistic admissions approach that demands they scan through your application for factors outside of academic performance.

If you’re applying with a GPA lower than the average accepted student profile, then you’ll certainly be at a disadvantage. In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about how to get accepted into USC with a lower GPA.

As proof, we’re using a previous client of ours, their academic profile, and their application essay as proof that getting in is not impossible.

Table of Contents

1. How Our Client Got Accepted Into USC With a 3.4 GPA
   • Strong Essays. Period.
   • The Advantages of Applying as a Transfer
2. How to Get Into USC With a Low GPA
   1. Use USC’s Supplemental Essay Section
   2. Be Transparent and Honest About Your Insufficiencies
   3. Tell a Great Story
3. USC Essay Example: Please provide a statement that addresses your reasons for transferring and the objectives you hope to achieve. (650 words)

How Our Client Got Accepted Into USC With a 3.4 GPA

Strong Essays. Period.

Just to clarify, our client was not accepted into USC with a 3.4 GPA because they had overwhelmingly crazy extracurriculars. They did not cure cancer and they don’t own a Fortune 500 company. Instead, they were a balanced student. They had some extracurricular and personal experiences that made for a well-rounded education.

However, they had strong essays.

While helping them, our client said they needed help answering the USC transfer why us essay question. We retrieved a basic academic profile from them, some general background information, and formulated a plan on how much time and work is needed to complete a set of strong USC essays.

To make strong USC essays, we needed to work with them for a decent chunk of time. This meant brainstorming, editing, rewriting, conducting mock essay writing, and actively listening to our client’s feedback.

Writing a strong set of USC essays is crucial to increasing your chances of acceptance. This is especially true for those with lower than average stats. As we mentioned earlier in the introduction of this guide, USC is a school that incorporates holistic admissions. That means they need to look at the whole application and its nuances before coming to a decision on whether you’ll succeed in their school.

More often than not, a student with a mix of B’s and A’s (sometimes even a few C’s here and there) is completely qualified for USC. They have the academic potential to handle the rigor, and they can maintain performance stability over time.

But, because there are other high-performing students to choose from with fantastic extracurriculars and projects, it’s up to you to ensure you can stand out from the rest of the admissions pool as a unique applicant. USC’s essay section is the opportunity for that, and they ask a lot of questions specifically to search for fantastic students who may not have met the GPA mark.

The Advantages of Applying as a Transfer (For What it’s Worth)

This applies to most schools. But, it’s easier to get accepted into USC as a transfer than as a freshman applicant.

However, we believe this is an important detail to address. Just because applying to USC as a transfer is easier doesn’t mean one should consider doing so. If anything, they should apply as a freshman; then, if they cannot get in then they apply as a transfer.

This is because applying as a transfer is still difficult. Just because it’s a bit easier doesn’t mean that it’s easy at all. Getting accepted into USC as a transfer is still very difficult and getting in by beating the rest of the competition is no simple fear.

You’ll have an advantage; but, be wary of allowing this to get in the way of a good set of application essays. We don’t come across this often, but some students think that because it’s easier they can spend less time on their USC transfer essays. USC still places a high value on supplemental essays; so, disregarding it is a surefire way to send your application to the rejection pile.

In this case, our client was applying as a transfer. Their GPA would still put them at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the applicants in their intended major. So, it was crucial that he had a strong set of essays that would increase her value to the school.

How to Get Into USC With a Low GPA

Use USC’s Supplemental Essay Section

As mentioned previously, USC’s supplemental essay section is crucial in securing a spot in their class. Preferably, what you write in your essays would address your low GPA at least once.

If you are below the level of performance USC wishes to see in its students, it is recommended you dedicate a space to describe the reasons for your insufficiencies. Usually, admissions officers are more understanding than you may think. It’s common for students to actually forget or disregard certain disadvantages that they have; because of this, they miss out on explanations for their lower GPA.

When we work with our clients, we always conduct a few brainstorming sessions with them to get a better feel for their background information and general life story. More often than not, students have a lot of contributing factors leading to a lower GPA that they’re NOT aware of.

Here are a few examples:

1. Body insecurity
2. Personal friendships and relationships
3. Anxiety, Depression, and other mental health struggles
4. Family struggles
5. Family divorce
6. Addictions (Video games, social media, etc.)
7. Noise levels (there is a lot to talk about with this topic)
8. Conditioning for improper study habits

When explaining the reasons for your lower GPA in your USC supplemental essay, don’t forget to write about WHY that factor contributed to the dip in academic performance. Often, people throw out reasons expecting admissions officers to just connect the dots on their own. So, it’d look like this.

“My academic performance dipped from Sophomore year through Junior year; I earned a 3.8, then dropped to a 3.33 GPA. This is because of my depression.”

This seems self-explanatory. However, you need to consider that depression has many manifestations that can contribute to a harder time performing in school. How exactly did it affect your ability to perform in school?

So, you may say something like how depression made it difficult to process emotions properly in everyday life. This could make regular work and tests from school infinitely harder because your negative emotional responses don’t function; thus, you won’t be able to process when you need to increase your academic performance. Or, conversely, due to depression you don’t process positive emotion either. Therefore, your academic successes don’t encourage you to strive further and thus halt any motivation to move forward.

Be Transparent and Honest About Your Insufficiencies

One of the most important elements of a strong college application essay is honesty.

We know this sounds a little bit cheesy; but, there’s a lot of practicality to honesty and transparency. The USC admissions office is bombarded with high GPAs and SAT/ACT scores all the time. Many variables can lead to a strong academic profile, and that’s why admissions officers sometimes can’t always trust what’s on paper. Academic truth and honesty are always questioned.

In the admissions process, opening up and being transparent about your insufficiencies is a great way of proving to admissions officers that you’re capable of being honest. This is especially true when you have the confidence and maturity to be honest about that which you’re lacking.

Part of a mature character is knowing when to be humble and admit to your insufficiencies. In fact, being able to admit to your failures is a great way of showing admissions officers that you’re truly challenging yourself and overcoming obstacles.

In the example USC transfer essay, we advised the applicant to open up about their confusion over other people’s perfect career paths. The applicant is honest and truthful about how she is genuinely confused about why so many people can just magically know what exactly they want.

If you’re creative, you can use your insufficiencies as a strength in the application process. Sometimes, you can make an argument that it is because of your insufficiencies that you are pursuing USC in particular. For instance, in this case, the applicant can write about USC being the best fit for them because they need to truly find the inspiration needed for a real dream career.

Tell a Great Story

This detail is important. However, we understand this can be kind of hard.

It’s not easy to write a great story for your USC essay. In fact, telling yourself to “just write a great story” is quite difficult without also knowing all the fundamentals of writing. There are many rules and factors that go into writing a great story. However, we’ll cover just a few of them.

The first thing you can do to write a great story is to write about something that demonstrates the rigor and difficulty of your environment; then, explain in deep detail why it is difficult. Let’s use the infamous Bay Area Duck Syndrome as an example topic. If you don’t know what it is, you can read more about it here. But, long story short, Duck Syndrome is a term used to describe a student’s need to be calm and collected whilst being under lots of stress to perform academically.

Instead of writing your USC essay about what Duck Syndrome is and how it manifests in your life, you may want to get more in-depth with the emotional aspect of it in your life. So, you may describe in detail how community pressure to fake happiness and glee is dishonest and tears at your psyche. You may also describe through imagery how the “fakeness” only further exacerbated your need to be genuine and truthful in the end; thus, your weakness in the face of adversity can be changed to strength.

Another aspect of great storytelling in the USC essays is using metaphors to describe difficult things. Sometimes, students have experiences that are hard for people to truly understand. Sometimes they live as minorities in a community that doesn’t accept them. Sometimes, they have conditions they find irrational that cannot be explained through logic. Using metaphors helps with describing these experiences, and it helps admissions officers understand your situation better.

USC Essay Example: Please provide a statement that addresses your reasons for transferring and the objectives you hope to achieve. (650 words)

“How is it done? That intrinsic, human spark that captivates people from the inside: how do people get it? How do people just “happen” upon their dream careers?

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life; that is until I saw a movie about becoming a doctor. That inspired me to be a doctor!”

Is it really that easy?

“If you want to succeed, just follow your dream” At least, that’s how the saying goes.

I didn’t truly discover my dream career, or really at all. In some ways, it was more like psychology called to me, and it took thorough experience and self-reflection to fall into its arms.

In 2017, my mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. To ordinary folk like us with no experience in psychology and psychiatry, we were like people in the Dark Ages believing diseases were a result of some cosmic horror. We had no idea what to do.

Then, as if the theme of cosmic horrors and unknown sorcery could not stop, my mother visited a psychiatrist. She performed a miracle, and my relationship with my mother balanced into perfect harmony.

There it is again: that people could forge answers just like that. Like those who conjure dream careers instantaneously, she made every problem vanish into thin air. It’s done. Poof. Gone.

How could someone take what I’ve struggled with for years and stitch it together in a span of a couple of months? This fantastic ability inspired me to learn the same skills that would help countless others, thus leading me to psychology at Irvine Valley College.

There, I navigated the necessary college journeys which characterized every proper education: saving on finances, adjusting to higher-level academics, and developing a strong foundation on understanding the human psyche. Exploring psychology, I found the field was like discovering an entire secret room hidden in a house –the house being my mind and the secret room is the hidden intricacies that were always in my mind.

“Oh, so that’s how the relationships between bipolar people enter vicious reactive cycles! Who’d’ve thought it? Why is no one talking about this?”

Within the past year, I learned how much I enjoyed working around patients, learning about their lives, and seeing the profound effects healthcare workers had on them. Falling in love with a career deconstructing pathologies that plague people’s lives became inevitable.

So, a premedical journey at USC is vital.

USC’s Keck Medical Center’s shadowing program will expose me to more clinical work from different specialties. Trojan Health Volunteers program will help me gain hands-on experience with patients at the Los Angeles community. I’d also love to join research in psychology with USC’s professors to get a better understanding of the development of the human mind. I have a particular interest in gifted minorities and disadvantaged immigrants.

The Los Angeles area is a melting pot of cultures, and the gifted Asian-American community is no different. Many disadvantaged immigrants struggle with the “gifted child” problem, which inexorably dooms said gifted immigrant children to low performance, anxiety, and self-esteem.

Helping unrecognized children would be a meaningful pursuit. It’s the spark in my career that I can truly look toward that brings positive change. USC’s perfectly fitting resources and even geographical location would be perfect for this.

After months of contemplation, I found psychology to be the spark of my future career. However, this is not like other “dream” jobs –calling it a dream would be a disservice. To attend USC and fulfill my aspirations to work in mental healthcare would make it not a dream, not a falsehood, but a reality.”

USC Why Us Transfer Essay That Worked

It’s not easy to know how to get into USC with a low GPA. More often than not, it takes strong extracurriculars and essays to help get accepted. This is not always a simple approach. If you’re looking to get accepted into USC with a low GPA and need help, consider scheduling a free 30-minute consultation to speak with a college admissions advisor and consultant. Our expert advice has helped many students get accepted into high T20 schools even when their scores were low.