Like a lot of teenagers, Neil Verma is practically obsessed with getting into the right college. He spends as many as four hours a night studying to make sure his grades impress the admissions office. He's researching the best teachers to ask for recommendations. And he's constantly checking his to-do list so he won't miss the application deadlines.

But Mr. Verma's not a high-schooler. He's already in college, attending the University of Miami as a freshman. He's putting himself through the admissions wringer all over again this year, hoping to be accepted as a transfer student at Dartmouth or the University of Chicago. Both schools were his top choices and turned him down last year. "I have to try," he says.

Applying for a transfer used to be mainly for students who concluded they weren't happy at their current college. But with competition for top schools so fierce, some students are approaching the transfer as simply an extension of the admissions process -- one more shot at getting into the best institution possible.

For these students, freshman year of college looks more like senior year of high school. They're focusing so intently on factors they think will boost their transfer applications -- touring campuses on weekends, getting tutors to help them refine their personal statements -- that some traditional freshman-year activities, like experimenting with new course subjects or simply acclimating to living on their own, are often sidelined. So high is the anxiety surrounding the name on the diploma that some kids are even making the switch from supposedly lesser Ivies to Harvard or Yale.

Just as soaring first-time applications are making it harder to get into college in the first place, an increase in transfer applications is upping the competition there, too. Brown University this year admitted 44 transfers out of about 1,100 applicants, compared with 283 admitted last year out of 823. Williams College has a message on its Web site saying it has been accepting fewer candidates in recent years. And in surveys of students who transferred into the University of Pennsylvania, 15% say they came because they were rejected as high-school seniors, three times the number who said that a decade ago. "Sometimes the second or third time's the charm," says Lee Stetson, the school's dean of admissions. "I give them credit for persisting like that."

With the contest tougher now, it bears knowing from one year to the next where the odds are best. Georgetown , for example, is on a four-year push to increase enrollment by a total of 375 students, including more slots for transfers. Harvard's transfer pool has widened by as much as 20 spots in recent years, thanks to an expanded study-abroad program leaving more dorm rooms vacant. Cornell has "guaranteed transfers," a little-known loophole that holds spots for the best of its rejected high-school seniors.

Transfer U.: Abigail Wright, top, switched to Harvard from Columbia

The number of transfers a school admits is typically based on a statistical formula, depending on how many students the campus anticipates losing for a semester or two to study-abroad programs and how many of the students admitted to the freshman class actually decide to attend. Transfers benefit when fewer freshmen accept the invitation.

Not long after the fall convocation at the University of Tulsa, when students gathered to hear President Steadman Upham praise the class of 2010 as lifelong learners and future leaders, Tom Fagan's thoughts started to stray. The freshman was thinking about the University of Michigan, which had rejected him in April. Within a few weeks of arriving at Tulsa , he'd set a transfer plan in motion.

Now, the highlights of his freshman year will make their way onto his transfer application. He joined the school's marching band as a trombone player -- which he thinks could appeal to Michigan , a Big Ten football school with a winning band. He's planning to work on his foreign-language skills by spending next summer with a host family in Berlin . He's volunteering in the Big Brother program and has added a fifth class to his roster, economics, when many freshmen stick with just four classes and save more specialized subjects for later. "It's a pain," he says.

To avoid another rejection by Michigan , the 18-year-old is researching how to increase his odds. Though he hopes to major in business, he's thinking of applying to the university's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts instead of its competitive Ross School of Business. Later, he says, he can move to the business school as a cross-campus transfer, which he thinks will be easier to do once he's already enrolled at Michigan . To keep his options open, he's considering applying to the University of Wisconsin, too.

University of Miami freshman Neil Verma hopes to transfer to the University of Chicago or Dartmouth.

Mr. Fagan's mother, Olga Fagan, says she's also feeling the stress all over again. "I'm worried that he's going to have his heart set on leaving and may not get into places he'd like," she says. Mr. Fagan, meanwhile, says he's open to the possibility of staying at Tulsa . The family will have a Thanksgiving summit about the issue when he goes home to Midland, Mich., and Ms. Fagan will encourage him to apply to at least four places so he can have some choices. "We just got him off to college," she says. "I'm just catching my breath."

Amy Sack, the president of Admissions Accomplished in Trumbull, Conn., which works with college applicants on everything from mock interviews to resume polishing, offers a transfer package starting at $1,000 up to $5,000. The upper tier includes weekly one-hour meetings for up to 10 applications over a three-month period.

Ms. Sack says she recently helped get one student at Smith College a transfer to Brown, Cornell and the University of Chicago by having her retake the SATs (the student improved her scores by more than 100 points) and pushing her to keep a 4.0 grade-point average. "I always tell students, if you have a dream, don't give up on your dreams when you're 17," she says.

Ms. Sack is telling clients Tulane in New Orleans is a good bet this year for transfers because of its decline in enrollment after Hurricane Katrina. (A Tulane spokesman says the school's quality is still high even though its numbers are down.) Stanford, says Ms. Sack, is a tough one -- the school admitted 10.9% of all its applicants for fall 2006, but just 5.1% of its transfer applicants last year. "There are schools that are more transfer-friendly than others," she says, "but that changes from year to year."

Chuck Hughes, a senior admissions officer at Harvard from 1995-2000 who now runs Road to College, a college counseling service, says he warns students about small liberal arts schools, since their transfer acceptance rates are low. Case in point: Middlebury College , which last year accepted one student as a transfer, despite receiving 230 applications.

James Corp has started his school shopping from scratch. The 18-year old is a freshman at the University of Michigan, but he doesn't plan on staying there long. One option is Cornell, where he was offered a guaranteed transfer -- a conditional acceptance to enroll a year later pending good grades -- after being rejected last year.

He says he thinks it would be exciting to be the first member of his family to attend an Ivy League school. But he's not stopping at Cornell -- he's also expanding the search, and recently added to his transfer application list the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University .

During study breaks between his English, lighting-design and intensive French classes, he's revising his application essays -- he may try to go to NYU in the spring, which means making an application deadline next month -- and is tracking down his high-school transcripts. All the while, he's trying to stay close to his 3.99 high-school GPA.

The teenager says some nights he gets less than five hours of sleep, going to bed around 1 a.m. after studying and working on his personal essay for his applications. While his friends have memorized the Michigan fight song -- "The Victors" -- and sing it at football games on the weekends, Mr. Corp says he only just learned the words. "I don't really feel like it's my school," says the freshman from Novi, Mich., who says he's been to one football game all year, didn't stay through the fourth quarter and wore the colors of the opposing team, Vanderbilt, by accident.

He's told a few of his friends what his transfer plans are, and some are starting to feel rebuffed: "They kind of feel betrayed, like you think you're too good for Michigan ."

Mr. Corp's mother, Shawne Duperon, says she worries that he will get uprooted as soon as he starts to feel at home at Michigan , leaving him physically and emotionally exhausted. Despite her reservations, and the fact that her son would be giving up a scholarship at Michigan , she also says there's a part of her that wouldn't mind if he switched to Cornell. "Part of me would love to be able to say, 'I've got a kid at an Ivy League school,' " she says. "How cool would that be?"

Recruiters say they keep their eyes out for transfers as they review new graduates for positions. Jean Wyer, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting and consulting firm, says she'll always ask if she sees a student has transferred and she'll "listen carefully to the answer" to make sure the student wasn't simply trying to load his or her resume for the sake of status.

Morgan Stanley's Vic Garber, managing director for fixed income, who also runs recruiting for that division, says often when he sees a transfer on an applicant's resume, it shows the candidate has "hustle" and the drive to get to their dream school. "It shows a certain amount of dedication to a purpose."

But Thomas Caleel, director of M.B.A. admissions and financial aid at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says he expects transfer students to offer a compelling reason for their switch. "Take us beyond just the ratings game," he says.

Peter Van Buskirk, vice president of college-planning solutions at Peterson's, the education and career-guidance company, tours the country presenting an interactive workshop to high-school students and their parents entitled "Winning the College Admission Game." Where a decade ago, parents at the workshop would privately ask him about transferring so that other parents wouldn't hear, now they're openly inquiring about using transferring to get into the nation's top schools.

But part of the transfer pressure is coming from the students themselves. Carol Lunkenheimer, Northwestern University 's dean of undergraduate admission, says parents often call to ask questions for freshman applications, while students call for transfer information. "They're doing their own work," she says. "It tells me they're really interested."

Historically, most transfer students go into the larger, state schools, often from community colleges. Many of the elite private schools have high retention rates and accept fewer transfers. But with the strategy increasingly common, the National Association for College Admission Counseling says that for the first time this year, it will include several transfer-related questions in its annual survey of 2,400 four-year institutions, asking about the criteria schools use to pick transfer candidates.

For some students, one Ivy acceptance isn't enough if the nod doesn't come from their dream Ivy. "I think for a lot of people, Harvard is a dream school -- for me it definitely was," says Abigail Wright, who arrived as a transfer to Harvard from Columbia last year. While more than 10 of her classmates from prestigious Milton Academy got into Harvard as seniors, she was waitlisted. "It didn't feel fantastic," she says. She had been pleased with her college applications -- she felt her essay, which she'd written over a couple of weekends about the epiphany she experienced after surviving a car crash, came out well -- but she was feeling burnt out.

At Columbia , she signed up for core classes in science and literature, as well as Latin and psychology. While she wrote for the school newspaper, she knew there were more activities she'd be interested in, like the radio station, that she didn't bother with -- she wasn't in the frame of mind to get too deeply embedded in the school.

She approached her Latin and literature professors -- teachers from her smallest classes who seemed to know her best -- for recommendation letters. "A lot of professors aren't necessarily familiar with the process. They ask you, 'Why would you want to transfer away from here?' "

Now at Harvard, the 20-year-old thinks it's ironic she transferred since she's realized she wants a career in broadcast news -- Columbia is known for its journalism school -- but she says her new school can enhance her career in the long run: "The name Harvard helps you get internships."