Think back to high school, when your kitchen table was a mess with college applications and your head was spinning with different facts from different schools. You waited anxiously for days for the acceptance letters to arrive in the mail and then spent days agonizing over which school to choose. Now imagine going through that process again, this time as a transfer student, and being plagued by complications in transferring credits and difficulties in starting over again at a school where everyone is already settled.
There are benefits and drawbacks to making the decision to start over again at a new school. At some schools, securing housing is an issue, while at others, transferring credits is problematic. And there's always anxiety about social life.
At Tufts, transfer students make up 1.85 percent of the undergraduate population at Tufts. These roughly ninety students accepted each year begin their Tufts experience with the transfer student orientation. This separate orientation is unique to Tufts, as most schools in the New England area assume that transfers will acclimate to their new surroundings with regular freshman orientation or with no orientation at all.
"I liked it because it allowed [transfer students] to get to know each other well," said junior Jessica Jacobson, who transferred to Tufts last year from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. "We all lived together [in Lewis Hall or Carmichael Hall], got to know each other, and coped with the changes together."
Students transferring in the spring semester, however, aren't offered an orientation. They arrive at school a day early just to deal with transfer credit and advising issues. While junior Dena Wigder, who transferred from the University of Texas at Austin last spring, didn't get much of a chance to interact with other transfers the day before classes resumed, she felt that living on campus in a double contributed to the social aspect of coming to Tufts.
Although the University does not guarantee housing to its returning juniors and seniors, it promises on-campus residences for all transfer students. This is in stark contrast to other regional schools like Boston College and Boston University that only allow transfer students to sign a waiting list for campus housing. The result is that transfer students to these schools sometimes wait more than three semesters for a room, according to admissions representatives at BC and BU.
"Guaranteed housing was a big factor in choosing Tufts," Wigder said.
The transition to Tufts is eased by housing guarantees and a unique fall orientation, but many academic policies and requirements enforced by the University hurt the transferring students. Due to strict requirements such as the six-semester foreign language cluster or the expository writing English 1 class, some students enter Tufts in a different graduating class than they were in at their previous school - usually a lower one.
The foreign language requirement for liberal arts majors is particularly hard on transfers. New Tufts juniors, for example, have just four semesters to complete the requirement.
"The [foreign language] classes are some of the most stringent requirements, and it seemed to be one of the bigger problems we faced," Jacobson said. But in spite of Tufts' strict requirements for fluency in a foreign language, its policies measure up to many area colleges and universities, which demand much from their students.
Students also have difficulty with transferring credits. Many of the classes at students' previous schools will not be accepted by the University because it does understand transfer students' previous curriculum.
Final decisions on what classes can count at Tufts come from a panel of University that is charged with awarding transfer credits and deciding whether those credits can be applied towards a certain class, such as English 1, for which numerous schools do not have an equivalent class.
Tufts provides its transfers with a transfer counselor, but the counselors cannot provide information on whether students' previous classes will match those available at Tufts. "Students don't know what can or can not transfer over to Tufts until they arrive here," said Gina Beck, a transfer counselor at admissions.
The result is that many students are left with general or extra credits. These credits do not have an equivalence in any one class at Tufts, but since they closely resemble previously-taught classes they are accepted and count towards the graduation requirement in terms of total credits.
Other schools usually tell students what credits will be accepted earlier on in the game, which could influence students' decisions about whether to transfer and to where.
For instance, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has its prospective transfer students work directly with a transfer counselor before the student ever arrives, who helps them through the process of what will and will not transfer to UMass.
Transfer students at Tufts must weigh the distress associated with transferring credits and fulfilling strict requirements against the University's reasonably good attention to quality-of-life concerns such as orientation and guaranteed housing.
"It was a long, drawn-out process, and in the end I wound up with a bad registration time because of how few credits were accepted by the school," Jacobson said.
Tufts allows a maximum of 17 credits to transfer from other schools, and in order to get the 17 more required to graduate in liberal arts, transfer students face a possible delay in the year of a students' graduation, thousands of dollars in extra housing and tuition fees, and knowing that they wasted time in classes that were deemed unacceptable by Tufts standards.
Overall, Jacobson gave the process a so-so rating. "It just wasn't smooth. Maybe it will get better in the future, but it's got a ways to go," Jacobson said.
