There are so many things I wish I knew before I transferred to a four-year residential school after community college. Here's the most important of them:

1. Adapting to residential campus isn’t as simple as “moving in” or “not getting lost”.

It’s a new lifestyle, a new routine, and a new campus to acclimate to. You have to be emotionally prepared to realize that you’re going to get caught unprepared, and often.

The challenges are going to be unpredictable; especially if you’re a first generation low-income student like me. It’s a socioeconomic culture shock.

The good news is this: you fail, you learn, you get better. You fail again, you learn again, you get excellent.

2. You really, really don’t know it all. You’re going to mess up – a lot. That doesn’t mean you can’t do this.

Traditional students are taught in their first year seminars how to present ideas in the formal fast-paced classroom and how to write within constructs of academic writing unique to their institution. Transfers skip all those introductions and walk right into third-year syllabi that more or less says, “this is about THE best work, not YOUR best work.”

Your best is only one version of what the school wants from you, and colleges have different “expectation cultures”. Yes, it can be maddeningly subjective. I had a professor tell me my ideas were “cream of the crop” but the paper was valueless because it was “mass market writing” not “academic writing” --- and you’ll have to swallow your pride, your accolades, any years of literary magazine editing and publications under your belt, and everything else that made you believe you’ve got it all figured out up to this point, and head down to the writing center. Clean slates are game reset. You just have to go with it.

3. Hey former Honors Kid. You’re not in Kansas anymore.

You might even struggle navigating advanced courses were the instructors already had built relationships with the other students within their small departments (on the bright side, if you're the only new face, people actually learn your name, New Kid). In these classrooms, your only hope isn’t Obi Wan Kanobi. It’s getting professors on your side. Office hours are your friend. Take advantage of them. (And believe me, I'm still only starting to figure it out.)

The college “transition” can still happen when you come to four-year, even if you already have an A.S., a 4.0, leadership experiences, internship-filled resume, and 20 or 30 college classes under your belt. You can have figured out how to win the Dean’s List in community college and balance the impossible (for me, that meant a work study, a full-time internship, course overload, family responsibilities, and a 2-hour commute every day) but that doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be a “relearning phase”

4. You’re not always going to be perfect, or even good. That's okay. "Don't stop until you're proud."

I sincerely believe, after long conversations with many other undergraduate transfer scholars from my Cooke Foundation cohort, that your first semester at a new school, no matter how hard you work or prepare, is not reflective of your ultimate potential. It’s possibly going to be a bumpy, lonely, bewildering time of your life -- it is for many students taking that leap. This shows up in your transcript, dents otherwise immaculate GPAs – particularly if you have a symptomatic reaction to stress (anxiety, depression, imposter syndrome, exhaustion, burnout, et cetera). That doesn’t mean you can’t (and you will) turn it around and finish strong. Don't let the first set of grades define you. Head up,.

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” ― Maya Angelou

5. Your time is limited. You have to maximize it.

Jump in – you don’t have time to acclimate slowly. Figure out your orgs early on and get involved as soon as possible (see next point!).

Go to workshops. Make appointments with your adviser, your class dean, your career services, and your counseling center. If you have a chronic illness or any ongoing sports injuries, make sure to check in with health services and even accessibility services. It’s like a world-tour of awkward introductions, but it is critical to know what’s available to you and where it is so that when you need help, accessing it is thoughtless and familiar in a crisis.

You’re completely starting over, and graduation is fast on the horizon. Finishing an entire institutional experience in just two years requires meticulous planning, and you have to be thinking ahead from day one. Have a working course plan before you start registering – registering for courses randomly when you only have four semesters to fill your B.A. (or, at Mount Holyoke, A.B.) requirements can set you back tremendously.

Thinking ahead protects you from getting cornered into more strenuous course-loads later on to keep up. It even helps to keep in mind that your last semester should be your lightest to allow for job hunting, graduation planning, and grad school testing and applications.

6. Don’t hope you stumble unto your tribe: actively design one.

It’s a major complaint at my institution: transfers struggle to acclimate socially. They don’t naturally have a community to walk into. We miss out on first year seminars or dorm experiences. Don’t wait to find your niche. Build it yourself. It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing – the things that interest you may not be obvious choices for a student in your department. Connecting with other transfers, taking group-work-based classes, mixing smaller courses where you get to recognize peers to balance huge, anonymous lecture classes, and getting involved with LLCs or your department open you up to getting to know your peers early on. Friendly faces help to hit the ground running when you’re trying to start a new life and not lose momentum in your college career -- even if it's just someone to text about notes for a class you missed.

7.You’re not a freshman, but you’re not an upperclassmen either.

Give yourself permission to be both. You’ve done the college thing. You’re older, you’re not so green – but this is still a radically knew experience. There is a learning period, a relearning period, and an adjustment phase.

As older students, professors are expecting a lot from us: high quality work and focus. Because of how close we are to graduation when we begin school, we’re already looking at internships, career planning, and maybe even graduate school. But this is new. You’re allowed to identity with the incoming experience just as much as the advanced-student experience. That’s okay.

8. It gets better.

At times, my campus felt exceptionally isolated and compartmentalized: an alien planet, galaxies away from home. The reality is: loneliness, depression, and anxiety are shockingly common in college students. Take comfort in the fact that it’s perfectly normal. Your only responsibility at that point is self-care, doing what you can, and pushing on. As Jared Padalecki once said, “Always keep fighting. Love yourself first. You are enough. You are not alone… be proud of your valiant day-to-day struggle.” If it's all you can do, then that's what you do.

9. Imposter Syndrome lies.

Okay, so I learned the hard way: knowing the material and doing the work isn't enough. The work itself has to be excellent every single time, pre-planned and painstakingly organized, often forwarded to a second pair of eyes no matter how good you think you are. It cannot simply be ‘perfectly competent’. I didn’t realize before I had spent so many years operating on ‘perfectly competent’. I went through an identity crisis of “Am I worthy of this level of study? Can I do this? Can I finish it? Do I belong here?" -- but it was ultimately elevating. You’ll figure it out and finish strong by the end of the school year. Not before it kicks you upside the head first, though.

Pro-tips:
A) if you’re first-gen and can’t get access to basic info or advice, then go to sessions designed for international students to learn the American college system.

B) If you can think of it, you can Google it, and eavesdropping in the FA or SFS office during FAFSA season never hurt anybody.

C) Don’t be ashamed to try tutoring centers, or even writing centers. My first roommate’s dad used to help edit essays using Google docs. It’s no different than a legacy asking a college-educated parent for help.

D) When it gets you down, remember this:
Because of you, someone in your family won’t be a first generation college student.

E) You deserve to be here. You deserve an education. You are worthy of this place. You are worthy of your space. End of story.

10. You’re in a strange new world with a lot to figure out – but that doesn’t mean home stress doesn’t disappear when you start going to school.

Back home, my mother is (and has been for four years) terminally ill and in hospice. My brother is mentally ill and disabled. I was their primary caregiver since high school, and was only able to leave for four-year because of the introduction and advancement of in-home nursing and counseling services. My other family members relied on me in other ways, largely for cooking, cleaning, and emotional support. My first year away, I had to take two unplanned leaves of absence to address their needs and return home.

I couldn’t afford to keep my phone on and at times, wasn’t accessible during crises I should have been there for. When it was on, I spent all my “down time” on the phone with them and with the doctors and hospice care that meets their needs, trying to keep things in order remotely. It resulted in periods where I was very depressed and heartbroken to have to explore antidepressants (note to self: there is no shame in that, ever. #Destigmatize)

I struggled immensely with what is referred to as "stress culture" – particularly, studying with caffeine-maintained sleeplessness across several days and the pressure to be as visible self-deprecating and committed to perfection as possible – when balancing relentless personal challenges, emotionally and back home.

Real life doesn’t wait for obstacles to become “age appropriate obligations” to saddle you with. Bad things happen. It doesn't matter if you're too young to lose a parent, or to support your siblings, or to deal with something. People rise to the challenge, or they don’t. At the end of the day, the things that make this hard also make it real. It’s your story. It’s your life. It’s evidence every single day that you are a survivor, resilient and gritty as the best of them. It’s strength, self-sufficiency, and preparedness for adulthood that sets you up for a long life of taking care of yourself and others in the widest range of extremes. When the universe decides to do its worst, then you do your best. If your head is above water, then you're not drowning yet. It’s enough. You’re enough.

11. There’s a mourning phase. (Spoiler alert: That’s okay.)

At my community college, I was chair of the student activities council, co-president and co-founder of Film Club, a work-study tutor and tech support member, an active member of Phi Theta Kappa, among other things. Even in high school, I was a club founder, a club president, an editor, a co-president, a representative, an organizer for campaigns, and a member of a small and familiar honors-AP cohort all four years -- essentially having a single class of students that I knew since I was a little child in Talented and Gifted programming despite the size of my high school. I wrote a book by the time I was 15 and was locally known for it, I did well-known local internships, and I racked up hundreds of hours of volunteer work everywhere from a broadcasting studio to a soup kitchen to a holiday village for kids to a farm that trained service animals. I was used to feeling like I had my hands in every pot, and everyone knew me. I had a large and loving family and a group of friends I had known my entire life. I was used to being in a tight-knit community that knew and understood me. They had no trouble interpreting my jokes or body language and values and speech patterns. Introducing myself was easy because I rarely had to do it. The years of being violently bullied and facing personal health issues “behind me” -- and all I had to focus on was keeping my mom (and the rest of my family) comfortable and as safe as possible.

All that disappeared – or was at least faraway – when I went away to school. The stress of responsibilities and baggage stayed with me, but the support system and coping mechanisms and “Home” feeling grew distant and inaccessible. I was homesick, lonely, and isolated. By the time I returned home, some parts of me became ancient history, and some parts of me were brand new. The interactions that were once easy became harder, or more forced. Everyone said I changed, and as much as most of it sounded like pride and praise, the rift was unhealable.

Some people didn’t understand why I went away, or looked badly upon me for choosing to leave (some felt I should have gotten married out of high school, or entered a local workforce despite the hopelessly dead entry-level job market, or stayed with my family because of their precarious and multifaceted health problems). As a result, I started to feel sick with guilt for leaving, or thinking I could get an education in the first place, or believing what I worked for made sense, or not having a "real job with real work". At that point, no matter how exhausted school made me, or how far I travelled, or how much I was doing, or how many jobs I was taking on, I always had to do more and prove it - but it never felt like enough. (It still doesn't, sometimes).

This is not at all uncommon for first gens, but it's still personal. It will always be personal when it's your community, and your loved ones, and your choices, and your life.

Inevitably, though, these are the growing pains of doing what no one has done before. It's the grunt work of taking on something incredible, transformative, and special. It’s a time of your life where you access a version of yourself that you are getting to meet for the first time. It aches, but it’s beautiful. All these things that “separate” you are new perspectives, cultural experiences, and the memory of adventures.

Speaking to my younger, forever-nerd soul: Frodo left the Shire for the road to Mordor. Sam Winchester left Stanford for Route 666. Peaks and valleys aside, there’s a reason that’s the plot of every story that has ever spoken to your soul, campy or not.

Change is agonizing, but the wanderlust that kicks it into gear exists for a reason. Whether you're a Put Your Records On by Corinne Bailey Rae type or a Heartbreak Dreamer by Mat Kearney type, you have to find your anthem, put those headphones on, head down, nose to the grindstone, and get through the rough. This is just one step to the journey. You have permission to mourn what you’ve lost. You must also remember what you’ve gained.

In short... Transferring is difficult. It’s weird. It’s impossible, maddening, frustrating, and deeply satisfying for the challenge of it.

Just between you and me? That’s what “transformative” looks like.