Carolina Alumni Review - March/April 2007

more applications from students applying from four-year schools. Most who apply as freshmen and didn’t get in and now are reapplying — most of those went to four-year schools.”

Against the pattern

Farmer readily acknowledges that the competition for transfer admission generally is less rigorous than for freshman admission because, proportionally, there are more transfer slots per number of candidates. But he looks at GPA and other measures in a larger context. “There are plenty who have transferred into Carolina having done terribly in high school. They have been great students — but they did terribly in high school,” he said. “A place like Carolina can’t be only for people who have all hit their stride academically in the exact same way.”

One in that category is Aaron Fulkerson ’04. When he graduated from his California high school, Fulkerson had a GPA of 1. 67. After some time as a self-described dharma bum — though he also started several businesses — he set his sights on UNC because he admired Fred Brooks, who founded UNC’s computer science department.

Fulkerson knew he had no chance of admission on the strength of his high school record, and he figured getting his associate’s degree first would save him some money. He and his wife moved to North Carolina and established residency. He went to Durham Tech for two years, did consulting work and helped start several nonprofits. When he transferred to Carolina, he boasted a GPA around 3. 8 and a Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship. Twenty-four and married, he wasn’t concerned about being out of step with other students on campus.

“If I was a 20-year-old and wanted to go to frat parties, it might have been a downer for me,” he said. “I was there to go to school, get my degree and start a company.” That’s just what he did. With a friend he met while at UNC, he founded an open-source software development company called Mind Touch with offices in Minnesota and California.

So much for the significance of high school GPAs. SAT scores, Farmer says, predict a student’s performance in the first year of college. “The farther a student gets from the first year, the less attention we have to pay to the SAT. Somebody who is a capable student in high school, takes the SAT and

FRIENDS MAKE A DIFFERENCE

LARRY BAUM, THE DAILY TAR HEEL

Champions deserve

a top-ranked Library

Coach Anson Dorrance and the Women’s Soccer team won their 19th NCAA Championship in December. Coach Dorrance made his annual gift to the Library the same week. His personal commitment to the team includes doing his part to make sure the Library has the resources players need to excel in their classes as well as on the field. Won’t you join him in making a gift to the Library this year so that all of Carolina’s students and faculty members continue to find the information they need for study and research?