Interested students must take the American College Test (ACT) and submit high school transcripts in order to qualify for consideration. Students are also encouraged to submit achievement tests and other scores they may have available. Qualified applicants should exhibit scores equivalent to those earned by the upper portion of graduating high school seniors.

After demonstrating qualifying test scores, you will be asked to arrange for 2 or 3 teachers to call the Transition School office and provide recommendations. Typically, at least one teacher should be math/science and at least one should be language arts/history.

Having submitted required scores, documentation and recommendations, students and their family are asked to spend a day visiting the Transition School, participating in classes, and interviewing with faculty members. Such interviews are intended to assess the appropriateness of the program for each particular student.

Once all applicants have been interviewed, admissions decisions will be made and mailed to students. Invited students are expected to respond within two weeks and provide a $350 deposit to secure their position.

Further details about admissions procedures are available online at: http://depts.washington.edu/cscy/eep/TSAPPletter.pdf

The Transition School and Early Entrance Program (TS/EEP) is one of the few direct to college programs, which are designed to allow highly gifted students to skip the entirety of high school. Despite the similarity in name, this program is not affiliated with EEP at Cal State. This program has two distinct phases broken down into the Transition School and the Early Entrance portions.

The Transition School is an intensive one-year program where young students are taught, in addition to basic subjects, the skills necessary to help them make the transition to full time college work. This portion of the program challenges them to stretch their minds and make themselves ready for the rigors of college, but does not immediately immerse them in college classes. As they become ready, students take one or more college classes to supplement the Transition School curriculum.

After successfully completing a year in the Transition School, students enter the Early Entrance portion of the program, where they take a full-time college course load alongside regular students. These students still have access to facilities and support, but they are no longer engaged in the kinds of close supervision and preparatory training that the Transition School offers.

Because of the value of family in supporting students during this transition, students are expected to live at home during at least the first two years of the program. Naturally this requirement limits attendance to those students who can arrange to regularly commute to the UW campus.

An informational video prepared by TS/EEP is available here: mms://media.depts.washington.edu/cscy/trans.wmv

The Robinson Center for Young Scholars, which oversees TS/EEP, is also responsible for the UW Academy.

TS/EEP is not a residential program and all students are expected to commute to the campus, but the program does have a number of facilities reserved for this program. Chief among them is the “one-room schoolhouse” that is the center of the Transition School portion of the program. This serves as a central location from which students are taught (by university faculty) during the their year of preparation before entering college full time. “At the same time, the setting of a one-room school within the large university provides individual attention, friendship, and a home base.” (Program Overview, TS/EEP Website) With fewer than 16 students a year, it is easy to see how they would come to trust and depend on each other during their time together in the Transition School.

Once they have graduated from the Transition School to become full-fledged, full-time early entrance students, participants no longer focus their lives around a single setting, but rather go out to classes alongside typical UW students. Still there are program facilities that they may return to during the day and between classes in order to do work, get help, or just socialize.

Throughout the TS/EEP experience, students have access to the wide range of resources typically available to all students at UW.

As has been described before, this is a two-step program. In it’s first stage, Transition School, it is very structured and intense with the aim of reparing students for full-time college life. The second stage, Early Entrance Program, is little different from a normal college experience.

During the Transition School program, academics are very structured and somewhat intense. Small classes taught by experienced faculty help develop the advanced verbal, conceptual, mathematical and scientific skills needed to succeed in the college environment. “Classes in mathematics, literature and expository writing, history, and science are designed to mesh with offerings at the University of Washington so that, as students are ready, they take one or more progressively challenging university courses along with their Transition School work” (Program Overview, TS/EEP Website).

The personalized attention and high expectations help develop a level of maturity appropriate to the student’s new setting. In addition to academics, time is spent on study skills, time management, note taking, and navigating the UW campus bureaucracy. The hope is to build a basic set of survival skills so that students can take advantage of the college opportunities without being overwhelmed.

Potential applicants are not only encouraged, but required to spend time visiting the Transition School in order to get a feel for the environment, level of the coursework, and whether it is appropriate to their situation.

After completing the Transition School portion of the program, the academic experience is relatively typical of that associated with an average UW student. The requirements students face are the same for any UW students. Early Entrance students are however given additional advising on which classes and programs might best meet their needs and aspirations. One difference is that students often wait somewhat longer than average (generally into their second full-time year) before declaring a major. This gives them a chance to get a better feel for what options the university offers and what they might want to do with their life.

The TS/EEP program furnishes some special activities (including a prom) and field trips, and students are invited to make use of the variety of activities and organizations available on the UW campus. Students are also encouraged to make and maintain friendships with people outside of the program as well as within it.

Colleges and universities are typically grouped based on the highest degree that they regularly award, which in the case of University of Washington is the Doctoral degree.

UW publishes visitor information and facts about their university at: http://www.washington.edu/home/about.html

Virtual and physical campus tour information: http://www.washington.edu/univrel/visitors/ctours.html

Form to request more information about UW: http://www.washington.edu/students/uga/request.php?id=1&type=FR

For detailed comparison information and college rankings, we recommend America's Best Colleges published by US News & World Reports and available online at a cost of $10.

The above data may be as much as five years old. Number of majors may include 4-year pre-professional programs.

Seattle is a major city with population 530,000 in central Washington State.

“Founded 4 November 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest state-supported institution of higher education on the Pacific coast. The University is comprised of three campuses: the Seattle campus is made up of sixteen schools and colleges whose faculty offer educational opportunities to students ranging from first-year undergraduates through doctoral-level candidates; the Bothell and Tacoma campuses, each developing a distinctive identity and undergoing rapid growth, offer diverse programs to upper-division undergraduates and to graduate students.

The primary mission of the University of Washington is the preservation, advancement, and dissemination of knowledge. The University preserves knowledge through its libraries and collections, its courses, and the scholarship of its faculty. It advances new knowledge through many forms of research, inquiry, and discussion; and disseminates it through the classroom and the laboratory, scholarly exchanges, creative practice, international education, and public service. As one of the nation’s outstanding teaching and research institutions, the University is committed to maintaining an environment for objectivity and imaginative inquiry and for the original scholarship and research that ensure the production of new knowledge in the free exchange of diverse facts, theories, and ideas.

To promote their capacity to make humane and informed decisions, the University fosters an environment in which its students can develop mature and independent judgment and an appreciation of the range and diversity of human achievement. The University cultivates in its students both critical thinking and the effective articulation of that thinking.

As an integral part of a large and diverse community, the university seeks broad representation of and encourages sustained participation in that community by its students, its faculty, and its staff. It serves both non-traditional and traditional students. Through its three-campus system and through educational outreach, evening degree and distance learning programs, it extends educational opportunities to many who would not otherwise have access to them.

The academic core of the University of Washington is its College of Arts and Sciences; the teaching and research of the University’s many professional schools provide essential complements to these programs in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural and mathematical sciences. Programs in law, medicine, forest resources, oceanography and fisheries, library science, and aeronautics are offered exclusively (in accord with state law) by the University of Washington. In addition, the University of Washington has assumed primary responsibility for the health science fields of dentistry and public health, and offers education and training in medicine for a multi-state region of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. The schools and colleges of architecture and urban planning, business administration, education, engineering, nursing, pharmacy, public affairs, and social work have a long tradition of educating students for service to the region and the nation. These schools and colleges make indispensable contributions to the state and, with the rest of the university, share a long tradition of educating undergraduate and graduate students towards achieving an excellence that well serves the state, the region and the nation.” - UW Website