<p>So my freshman is settling in but not connecting with her fellow students as much as she had hoped.</p>
<p>She knows that she needs to give it some time, but transferring is already rearing its head in the back of her mind.</p>
<p>My question to all of you out there:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Did your freshman ponder transferring early on but then settle in and never give it a second thought? What was the turning point?</p></li>
<li><p>Did your freshman ponder transferring and then transfer? Was it the right decision?</p></li>
</ul>
<p>My daughter has always taken a bit of time to settle in, and it wasn’t until mid-October that she’d found a group of friends and was fully comfortable at her college (Reed). She wondered if she’d want to transfer, and I spent a lot of time telling her to give it time. In the end, she was quite happy with the school and never gave transferring a serious thought.</p>
<p>My son settled in immediately (MIT) but talked about transferring pretty much once a week until his last semester, when I told him to stop and just graduate already. It was his way of coping with stress. I believe he even updated a transfer application pretty regularly.</p>
<p>My son did OK right in the beginning of freshman year but was miserable second semester. He did transfer applications and was accepted a couple of places, but ultimately decided he could change some things for himself at his current school and he stayed. It is a tough call. If transferring is a consideration, you have to get the stuff done by around March (it varies quite a bit from school to school). It is a lot of work and you need all sorts of recs etc. from your current college and the professors don’t even know who you are! Some schools take VERY few transfer students and others take quite a few. My son’s former girlfriend transferred from Vandy to Penn after freshman year- partly to be closer to home. She wasn’t really any happier at Penn, but stuck it out and is now a senior. </p>
<p>I think we build up college so much that the reality of it doesn’t always live up to the expectation. Not all the professors are great (many are not) and the intellectual stimulation might be very lacking- especially freshman year. There are a lot of strangers around and the classes are hard and not always very interesting. We (and the kids) spend years agonizing over the COLLEGE CHOICE and Oh My God, how will I get in to THE PERFECT SCHOOL. Now here they are as freshmen and sometimes it just doesn’t seem all that great.</p>
<p>Mine pondered transferring and did, but she didn’t really ponder it in earnest until around Thanksgiving of her freshman year. Although she was not in love with her first school from the gitgo, she did try hard to find her niche. Unfortunately, it never really happened. She was not comfortable with the predominant social culture there, and she’s not someone who is happy being part of a subculture. She’s a smack-dab-in-the-middle kind of a girl. So for her, changing schools was the right decision. </p>
<p>That said, I would encourage your freshman not to seriously entertain transferring yet. It’s hard to make a go of it if you’re already looking over the horizon, and transferring is not easy. Has she sought out some clubs or activities where she may find like-minded students?</p>
<p>Our older son never connected well socially at his school. He remains far closer to his high school crowd than anybody he has met since. However, he liked other aspects of the school well enough (close, inexpensive, and well regarded) that he never considered transferring. He is a senior this year and will have no regrets moving on.</p>
<p>Our freshman seems happy so far and hasn’t expressed a single complaint but I see a few clouds on the horizon in terms of the things he hasn’t said. We’ll have to wait and see how his social life develops. However, like the older one he is more likely to just suck it up than consider a transfer.</p>
<p>The older one applied to two schools and the younger one only to the one school. They didn’t see a lot of other places they wanted to be and continue to maintain that tunnel vision regardless of how the reality might differ from the initial perception.</p>
<p>Starting college is such a huge adjustment that frankly I am surprised at the number of kids who love it from day one.</p>
<p>We are not a family of joiners, so I am sure that is not helping when it comes to seeking out clubs and activities.</p>
<p>She is being sensible and doesn’t expect everything to come together immediately. She just hopes it will come together by the end of the first semester.</p>
<p>Her high school (which she loved) is known for being quirky and not particularly mainstream. So even though she is very sociable she is finding fitting in at a large Southern school harder than she expected. I don’t think she realized it would be as different as it is.</p>
<p>She has found a small part-time job and I think that will be good.</p>
<p>I should also add that she is not naturally inspired by academia, so loving her classes wouldn’t be sufficient to see her through.</p>
<p>Like you, I remember feeling daunted and somewhat deflated by all the reports on CC of blissfully happy freshmen, when mine was “just OK” – on a good day. (She actually didn’t disclose the depths of her unhappiness to us until Christmas break, and by then she had made the decision to try to transfer.) It just stands to reason that folks are more likely to post that their kids are happy than that they are miserable, so don’t despair. </p>
<p>You mention your D is at a large school. That may be helpful in the long run. Even though the predominant culture may not be quirky, there is bound to be a quirky sub-culture among the large undergraduate population. I hope she’ll seek it out and find her people. And if she does ultimately decide to transfer, that’s OK, too. As MOWC points out, preparing transfer applications is not easy, and making the adjustment to a new school where you’re the new kid on the block is a challenge, too. But my D was very happy at her transfer school, something she knew in her bones from her first day on campus.</p>
<p>I agree with you, wjb, about the benefits of a larger school.</p>
<p>She is finding it frustrating to meet someone who seems nice enough and then never to see them again – something that wouldn’t happen in a smaller school.</p>
<p>She is also living in the Honors dorm although not an Honors student, so the pool of people like herself is not just outside her door.</p>
<p>Probably part of it is having to define for herself just who “her people” are…</p>
<p>fendrock: Did she expect her school to be quirky? I am so sorry she isn’t happy.</p>
<p>My D thought about transferring all frosh year but just because the work was so hard. All that pulled her through was identifying with the other kids.</p>
<p>Both kids had significant sophomore slump but it was more grades oriented that anything else.</p>
<p>Some schools keep acceptances active for a year. That’s an easy way to “feel it out.”</p>
<p>Wow! Never has there been a truer statement than Momofwildchild’s post “I think we build up college so much that the reality of it doesn’t always live up to the expectation. Not all the professors are great (many are not) and the intellectual stimulation might be very lacking- especially freshman year. There are a lot of strangers around and the classes are hard and not always very interesting. We (and the kids) spend years agonizing over the COLLEGE CHOICE and Oh My God, how will I get in to THE PERFECT SCHOOL. Now here they are as freshmen and sometimes it just doesn’t seem all that great.”</p>
<p>Though actually not thinking about transferring at all, my D has been struggling the first month so much that I realized that we had built up the expectation so high that she was depressed that college life was not living up to the ideal. We had a long talk about it and I told her honestly that I felt I was a huge part of building up the expectations - she decided to take it back step and try accepting the reality. I feel this new found realism will also help her make better decisions.</p>
<p>S knew he was going to transfer about 2 days after arriving at his first school. There were issues that he had no control over. One of those factors was the school proved to be too small for him (1500). So 2 weeks into that first semester he was meeting with the transfer counselor at the other college he had been accepted to. That process was very easy as they still had his original application and supporting materials. He was accepted as a spring transfer and enrolled that January. He is now a junior and very happy.</p>
<p>I’m sure it depends on the student and the circumstances, but it worked out very well for him and was definitely the right thing to do.</p>
<p>I think a lot has to do with how high up the school was on the kid’s list to begin with. When the school was not a top choice, as was the case with my DD, often they don’t give it much of a chance.</p>
<p>While she left for freshmen year saying she was open minded, the transfer talk never stopped and escalated the first term. She happily transferred to her original first choice.</p>
<p>I relatively seriously considered transferring my freshman year-- the classes were hard and I felt a bit over my head, especially compared with friends at schools just a couple of places down the US news list. I also had a bit of trouble making close friends initially, and was homesick and missed my boyfriend. By the second semester I was much happier, had found friends, and ultimately loved my school. Now I can’t imagine having gone anywhere else… so often I think it just takes time to adjust.</p>
<p>I am so glad I found this thread. DD spent a very conflicted freshman year at top 40 LAC ( twin brother also attends). By conflicted I mean she loved the academic challenge and environment and could not ask for better, more supportive relationships with professors. But as someone prior has said, there were probably many kids like her right outside of her dorm door-but she was reluctant to “put herself out there” and meet them. Instead, she spent both semesters studying to the exclusion of almost everything else and was already talking about transfers possibilities by Christmas.</p>
<p>Like many here, we encouraged her to hang in there and see how she would feel at the end of Spring semester. We spent most of the summer ( when not at her internship) debating whether to return to her school or do a transient semester here in the greater Atlanta area. She is now in the middle of a semester at Georgia Tech-and has learned , for her at least, the value of an LAC. She misses the commradarie with her professors and study groups. She has also learned she enjoys a less “monolithic” student body. It will be interesting to see what she decides over the Christmas holidays. She is learning the difficulty of transferring - lower acceptance rates, no guarantee of campus housing, curricular differences, etc.</p>
<p>To quote the great Paris Hilton: I wish I knew then what I know now. DD is a work in progress-will watch this thread as our situation evolves.</p>
<p>My D wasn’t sure that she made the right decision in the beginning. She had some great schools to choose from & she was never 100% sure she’d made the right choice. Add to that the fact that she knew no one, she was FAR from home, and her roommate was not a good match to say the least. But by the end of first trimester, she gained a circle of friends and a measure of comfort. </p>
<p>However, her desire to transfer grew stronger even though she was happy at her school. Her academic goals were not really being met at her school, and she ended up transfering to one of the schools she had turned down the year before. She spent hours investigating academic offerings at the transfer school, and she visited twice during the school year. As a result, she is happy at her new school even though it is not as good a fit socially as the first school was.</p>
<p>My D, like wjb’s ( and we two have discussed this in the past) never fit in the prevailing culture of her school. It was not a matter of not wanting to be there to start, so much as not understanding what she was looking for till she found it.</p>
<p>She transferred after frosh year to a completely different kind of school, and was blissfully happy thereafter. I’ve written about this extensively here, and you can prob’ly find that, but basically, it was going from frat/party culture with a frisson of academic possibility to quirky, real smart kid school, and finding her people.</p>
<p>But, as i’ve always maintained, transfer is not easy–do it because you feel you have to, and only then.</p>
<p>My younger son was pretty miserable at his top choice school for the first semester and came home at Christmas determined to transfer. The problem was 100% social - it took a while to find (what he viewed as) his social peers. He joined a frat in January, and that was the last we heard about transfer. Sometimes finding an organization such as a frat (and believe me I am not otherwise pro-frat!) or some other EC can make the difference at a bigger school when the kid feels like he is surrounded by kids not at all like him.</p>
<p>Just to clarify - my daughter is not actively unhappy - she just wants to love where she is and that hasn’t happened yet.</p>
<p>She describes herself as “bored.”</p>
<p>This was her first choice school.</p>
<p>I am intrigued by this phenomenon of students having trouble finding a social niche - but then after five or six months many of them settle in with a circle of friends. </p>
<p>Actually the gradual accrual of social contacts probably happens in high school also, but somehow the expectation is that it will be instantaneous in college.</p>
<p>Wanted to add that my daughter is not the quirky type - she fits with what wjb had to say about her d:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s just that my d has been a smack-dab-in-the-middle-kid in a high school which is not the typical All-American school and has higher than average quirk factor.</p>