No one begins their freshman year of college with the intention of transferring to a different school a year later. While I had a lot of apprehension and dread about the upcoming fall at my new school after graduation, I took it in stride and tried to make the best of my soon-to-be new life.
But after a few short weeks of classes, I knew I was in the wrong place. Yes, it was extremely challenging academically, but that I could learn to handle. What I could never learn to handle, however, was the culture of the school. At a massive state school with 40,000 undergraduate students, it was incredibly easy to get lost in the crowd and feel like a stranger wherever I went. I was just a number in their system, another filled chair in the lecture hall, and another student professors would never bother to learn the name of.
Around this time last year, I began to seriously look at transferring to another university, a university that has a culture that's more "me" and fits me better. It was by no mistake that the classes I enjoyed the most, regardless of the subject, were the classes with no more than 20-30 students in them. It was this realization that guided me to my next step: finding a small private university to attend in the following fall. It was never a question of whether or not I should go - that, I was set on.
But life as a transfer student isn't that easy either. Yes, you tend to get the best of both worlds: on one hand, you have a year of experience under your belt and don't have much adjusting to do (like the freshmen do), but on the other hand, you're in a brand new place where most people probably don't know who you are (just like the freshmen).
But there's a side to being a transfer student that not a lot of people mention - you find it hard to relate to freshmen, because so so SO much happens in that first year of college, but you find yourself almost "intruding" on friendships of returning students formed from the previous school year. And that's where I am right now. Yes, I went through recruitment, found my home away from home, and already gained some amazing friends through that, but I'm still troubled by trying to branch outside of my Greek house and make friends down the row and in classes.
I absolutely stand by my decision to transfer and don't have a single ounce of regret. I love my new life and my new home (for the next 3 years), and I can truthfully say I've never been happier before than I am now. Yes, there's a lot of things I wish were different and I have a lot of ground to catch up on, but these things take time.
