Should I transfer out of NYU?

Colleges and Universities A-Z New York University
1

Hi! I’m an LGBT, African-American freshman boy at NYU who is considering transferring for a number of reasons, and having a hard time making a decision.

Main reasons for transferring:

BIG: Hard to make and keep friends, hard to get to know people even when you join clubs and are involved in smaller communities. I only really hang out with a small group of the same friends weekend after weekend.

ACADEMICS: (So far) I’ve witnessed a lack of focus on undergraduate education. Most of my professors are still in the midst of their careers and put minimal effort toward teaching and making sure students understand the material. Often leaves students feeling unprepared to meet academic expectations

NEW YORK: New York City is busy, expensive and quite overwhelming. I am more of an introverted person who enjoys their privacy, and I thought living in New York would help me solve that, but instead I consistently feel overwhelmed and anxious. I end up spending most of my time in my room or in a friend’s room. Also, I can’t afford to do many of the things that make New York City so fun and memorable. Plus, even though I have a pretty sizable scholarship, I am still nervous about future affordability due to seemingly reasonless increases in price.

STUDENTS: NYU attracts a large number of intelligent, hardworking students, but they also attract a lot of students who are obnoxious, don’t care much about school, and/or just wanted to live in New York. Also, there is no campus culture, so it’s easy to feel disconnected from your peers. On a normal day, it doesn’t even feel like I go to NYU. It just feels like I’m struggling to make it in New York City.

I was thinking of transferring to a liberal arts school (Haverford, Colgate, Hamilton, etc.), a peer institution to NYU (Emory, Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt), or a couple of Ivies I feel I might have a chance at getting into (Brown and Cornell). Is this a good/feasible idea, and is it worth it? Or should I just suck it up and keep trying to make the best of NYU?

2

My D2 started out at a city school and had some of your same complaints.

She could have, and essentially did, say some of these very same things:
"I end up spending most of my time in my room or in a friend’s room. " ( a function of lack of common spaces, and students living only in dorm rooms, not private apartments/houses where they have much more personal space)
"I can’t afford to do many of the things that make New York City so fun and memorable. "
“Also, there is no campus culture, so it’s easy to feel disconnected from your peers.”
“On a normal day, it doesn’t even feel like I go to [ her school]. It just feels like I’m struggling to make it in New York City.”

She came to realize that she really wanted a campus-centered school that was not located in a big city.
So she transferred to one, and was very happy there. Much happier than at her first school.

YMMV.

3

I can’t say whether you would ultimately be happier at a less urban school, but I did want to tell you that there are plenty of ways to enjoy NYC without a lot of money, especially as a student.

Many museums have days or times when admission is free. Right now, you can go to Rock Center and see the tree. I’m Jewish, but I still like seeing it because it’s so quintessentially NYC. You can take the subway up to the Bronx with some friends and go to the Bronx Zoo or the Botanical Gardens (both have free days and times), you can ride the Staten Island Ferry. When I was young and poor, my friends and I used to take the subway from the Bronx, where I grew up, down to the ferry. We’d ride back and forth a couple of times in the summer and pretend we were on a cruise. You aren’t limited to school based activities, either. You can join other groups. You don’t say what your interests are, but there are groups for just about everything in the city.

Good luck to you.

4

re #2: “there are plenty of ways to enjoy NYC without a lot of money, especially as a student.”

Yes, but sadly those ways/ things are not what my D2 wanted to do, most of the time. Evidently. As she said “how many times does one really want to go to a museum?” While the things she did want to do most of the time, or her cohort did most of the time, cost too much money, in her judgement. She complained about movie costs, social life consisting of routinely going to bars that cost money, (because there was no place they could just hang out for free), etc.

If OP stays, he should certainly make more of an affirmative effort to find and pursue those other ways. Which do certainly exist. Maybe if that was D2’s only source of dissatisfaction she would have stayed and gone this route.

But D2 had more issues than this, and she successfully resolved all of them by transferring,To a college town where everything was priced for a student budget, people could in fact just hang out, in other people’s apartments or numerous other places, without spending any money, and the whole community revolved around the university. She liked that better.

Plenty of others of course might prefer to be in the big city, “campus culture” be damned, maybe have a bigger discretionary spending budget. There are good and bad aspects to both situations, that reasonable people may evaluate differently.

5

I’ve always been of the mindset that you have your whole life to live in a city, but really only four years to live on a “college campus”. If the hustle and bustle of the city makes you anxious, and you are not enjoying the academic experience - my vote would be for a change.

6

You’re finding out things that are kind of unique to NYU…it is a very different environment than most of the schools at the top 50 or so. There is no working around NYU’s environment. So, I would plan and submit a few transfer applications. Your preliminary interest list looks good…liberal arts school (Haverford, Colgate, Hamilton, etc.), a peer institution to NYU (Emory, Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt), or a couple of Ivies I feel I might have a chance at getting into (Brown and Cornell). Good luck!

7

@nyconfusedtransf I usually am a bit skeptical of transferring. However, you have quite concisely summarized about half of the good reasons that my kids didn’t consider NYU. It is a good fit for some kids, but not for all and I think your reasons make sense.

As a freshman, you still have 3 1/2 years ahead of you. To me it makes sense given what you have said to at least consider transferring. You will want to put some careful thought into where you would transfer to since of course you would like to get a significantly better fit in your second school.

8

You’ve made a strong case for changing schools. I’d say, though, your goals in doing so would be best reached if you were to transfer primarily for the academic reasons you’ve identified – such as for a stronger undergraduate emphasis and better connections with your professors. Should you then, for whatever reason, continue to be unsatisfied socially, you would nonetheless benefit from the most readily definable aspects you have indicated as important to you. Should the change in your social environment turn out well for you, even better.