It’s not quite the same thing, but without moving my daughter changed schools between 10th and 11th grades. She went from a private school where she had been since kindergarten, and where her social status was rock-solid, to a much, much larger public school where she only knew a few people and where, as she put it “I don’t even register as the new girl who might be interesting. I’m just one of hundreds of people you’ve never noticed one way or the other.” She hadn’t eaten lunch alone since she was 6; and she spent her first semester there with barely anyone to talk to. The handful of people she knew going in were not the people who were likely to be her friends. And lots of people at the new school had been together since at least 5th grade. The friendship circles seemed impossible to break into.
She never made a ton of close friends at the new school, but when the dust cleared she had made one great friend who has really been her #1 friend from that period in her life. Because we didn’t move, she actually kept most of her other friends from the original school, and 13 years later she is still close to some of them. But the friend from the new school turned out to be the real soulmate . . . not to mention a way more positive influence than her private school friends.
Those first few months were very hard. And there were some real issues transitioning between the schools’ very different curriculums, grading systems, and cultures. But things worked out just fine in every respect – friends, college, education. She became much more resilient and self confident as a result of the experience, too.