Transferring Lives
I just read in the Guardian, one of the many student newspapers on campus at UCSD, an article detailing the findings of a study concerning transfer students and their assimilation to the college culture. The claim was made that they could if they just tried harder. The other point they made was that transfer students have less interaction with faculty. Again, if they just tried harder, they would interact with faculty more.
Bullshit.
If a student transfers from a community college, there are several reasons for doing so. Just a few of which are these:
1. The student did not have the money to go straight to a four year university
2. The student did not have the grades to go straight to a four year university
3. The student did not plan to go to a four year university
For me it was #1. I did not plan on going to a four year university because of my financial situation. I understood my route to a real university was through the community college system. For the last two years of high school I did not participate in the usual frenzy that surrounded college applications and their eventual acceptance or denial. The joy and anguish of waiting by the mailbox for either the little envelope notifying you that your hopes had all been for not or that large one telling you that your life was starting anew, never passed over me.
For the most part, I was pretty blasé about the entire situation. It seemed, at the time, as if I had less pressure on my shoulders. Had I been given the opportunity, I like to think I would have worked my ass off, gone to college tours and applied frantically to as many universities as I could. Not having that chance however, I can’t be positive I would have. My one regret in life though, centers on that very situation.
In another life, in another place, perhaps I would have partaken in that high school experience. If my family had enough money to spend driving around to the different schools, setting up meetings with matriculation counselors and doing what generally people do in those situations. Comic and life changing hijinks may have ensued on every one of those trips, but I wouldn’t know. The thought of working so hard for great grades that would get you into the finest schools and have them pay your way sounds now like something I should have done. Instead I had decent, if not very respectable grades (somewhere in the mid3’s, perhaps 3.3 or 3.4), nothing spectacular. I wish I could go back and tell myself to quit sports at an earlier age, or at least focus more on academic endeavors instead. I regret that everyday. No, really.
Attending UCSD only seems to have solidified that regret. Day in and day out I see fresh faced freshmen as they wander around campus seemingly free from any real responsibility. Sure they attend classes and hopefully pass them, but other than that, they seem for the most part lacking in accountability. The experience to them is not centered around their classes. For them they live in dorms, have study groups, parties in their rooms. They are encouraged rather vehemently to attend on campus activities after hours. They wander the malls of a city new to them in search of what would look great in their dorm room. They are thrust into a situation knowing few people at hand and forced to make new friends, new lives. Some do not adapt as well as others and do not have that trying yet wonderful experience. But for the most part, the majority of students seem to live a life of ease. Their freshman year they are walked through school and given every opportunity to get by. Leniency is granted although it may sound as if those granting it do not wish to.
By their sophomore year, they have made friendships that will last throughout their time at school and perhaps father into life. They have chosen roommates for off-campus housing and have a social network in which they can operate, often times as if nothing has changed since the first year of being together. They are no more adult than they were just one year before, but carry with them an air of being so because they feel more at home, more prepared than those incoming freshmen whose upcoming experience they may quietly envy. Come junior year, just two years from graduation, they’ve got it together and have settled into their social groove. Sure they will continue to make friends, but not at the rate and often the profundity of which they did those first two developing years.
Maybe it was that I dated Gina when she first went off to UC Riverside that I feel stuck between the two camps of transfer students with not comprehension of real college life and those entering freshmen naïve of the world presenting itself. She lived in the dorms and I visited frequently. It turned out to be too frequent and because of that, I ended up taking what amounted to a year off of school. But the one thing it showed me was the world of possibilities afforded the new freshmen. Life in the dorms was similar to how it is portrayed in movies and television, but it has a distinct quality about it that makes it seem so much more real to you. I went up there so regularly that people at the dorms knew me. I stayed the night repeatedly, occasionally several, that it came to the point that I felt I was almost the one enrolled.
Being from San Diego, Riverside was a new town to me. It may have been only a hundred miles away, but it could have been twenty times that for all I knew. Visiting as frequently as I did gave me the chance to explore the city for what it was. Discovering places to eat around the campus, shopping in a grocery store different from the one I went to for ten years prior. These experiences all seemed so wonderful, so full of life, that I wanted so bad for it to be me living them. No matter what the activity, be it going to a movie theater, making out in the back seat of a car, stumbling into Denny’s at three in the morning, it was different from the same experiences in my hometown. Working was never something I heard of when it came to freshmen. They had their living quarters paid for, they ate at the dining hall and some had allowances given to them by their parents. Time not spent in class could be spent sleeping, relaxing and generally enjoying college life.
Her following year, she and three other people from her dorm decided to get an apartment just off campus. Being only 19 and never having moved (outside of when I was 3), moving Gina in felt as if I too were. It was as if I was suddenly living a life not my own, in a place I had never been before. But I knew that it was not mine to live. The parties thrown throughout the complex and the frat and sorority life she partook in were far from what I did when I left for my home.
There it was working part time and going to a community college. A college devoid of social life; of real human interaction. There, the friends you made were more often acquaintances you had from high school that perhaps you hadn’t befriended very well back then. There were no dorms so therefore you were not forced to make new friends. In addition to that, a good ten to twenty percent of your classmates were well into their twenties, if not older. What kind of social interaction can you have as an 18 year old with a 35 year old mother of three who immediately after class has to pick up her baby from daycare and swing by the soccer practice to coach? Student activities are laughable on most community college campuses. The fact that they try to have events is almost pathetic and I personally believe those putting them on felt the same.
The toughest part, I truly and honestly believe, was the fact that I worked over thirty hours a week in addition to school. Instead of being able to enjoy my limited college life, my time off was spent at work. The blessing in disguise of where I found employment was that great deals of my co-workers were in the same community college boat I was. We formed a fraternity of sorts, in fact we even referred to it as such, through which we would hang out and go to parties. It was however, nothing remotely like it was just a hundred miles north for Gina. She worked for a total of two weeks at Mervyn’s before quitting in order to spend more time enriching her college experience. It was not like she was spoiled, though one may say she was, but she did not have the added pressure of making ends meet.
Now that I have transferred to UCSD, I am presented with a new world all to myself. It is that world I vicariously lived just a few years ago, but it is so vastly different from what I had experienced in those formative first two years of school. The school did not seem to care about my experiences, they did not offer any support to me in the area of academia. I was expected, naturally since I had already been in college, to perform as if I had already been going to UCSD for two years. I was expected to know the campus, to know the process for everything and to generally have my wits about me. In a way, the transfer process seems to be a sink or swim trial by fire. Either you grab hold of everything and run with it as best you can, or you fall behind and are perennially screwed.
Due in part to my family’s financial situation, I have to work in addition to going to school. By work I mean work 40 hours in addition to the 35 to 45 a week I spend on school and the assignments given. When asked by a professor of mine this quarter what time outside of class would be good for me to attend a demonstration, I had to tell her that there as no time. If I was not in class, I was at work and if I was not at work, I was in class. She said she did not understand which makes me think it’s not a popular thing this 40 hour work week. Regardless, I must make ends meet and go to school. It is not a situation I enjoy or even admire, but it is my own. It is my college experience.
When I read in the newspaper that transfer students were less likely to be involved in student activities and be less engaged with the faculty, I thought to myself “no shit.” Was that really a surprise to the survey? Was it to the newspaper? Is it to anyone? They spend at least two years working at a school that offers them next to nothing in the form of social culture, only to be thrust into a situation teeming with it. They are expected to make friends with people who have more than likely formed the bulk of their clique by the time they transfer over when they have even less exposure to them than they would have two years prior. It’s not for lack of effort on our part; it’s for lack of time. With everything we have to do, we must pick and choose what we take part in, who we spend time with and what we do on campus. Add to that a lot of transfer students generally do not live close to the campus and commuting becomes an issue of time. Throw in the fact that most of them also work off campus, they probably spend as much time driving to and from school and work as they do attending class.
At least I do.
What else I do is regret every day what I had done. There are saving graces and silver linings to every situation. As much as I would like to change the situation so that at least I had the opportunity to live that prototypical college life, I can’t. I have resigned myself to that fact and will forever regret it. I will not regret my current situation however, because for the most part I am happy. To be clichéd, you have to learn from your mistakes. My atonement will be giving my kids the chance I didn’t have.
Bullshit.
If a student transfers from a community college, there are several reasons for doing so. Just a few of which are these:
1. The student did not have the money to go straight to a four year university
2. The student did not have the grades to go straight to a four year university
3. The student did not plan to go to a four year university
For me it was #1. I did not plan on going to a four year university because of my financial situation. I understood my route to a real university was through the community college system. For the last two years of high school I did not participate in the usual frenzy that surrounded college applications and their eventual acceptance or denial. The joy and anguish of waiting by the mailbox for either the little envelope notifying you that your hopes had all been for not or that large one telling you that your life was starting anew, never passed over me.
For the most part, I was pretty blasé about the entire situation. It seemed, at the time, as if I had less pressure on my shoulders. Had I been given the opportunity, I like to think I would have worked my ass off, gone to college tours and applied frantically to as many universities as I could. Not having that chance however, I can’t be positive I would have. My one regret in life though, centers on that very situation.
In another life, in another place, perhaps I would have partaken in that high school experience. If my family had enough money to spend driving around to the different schools, setting up meetings with matriculation counselors and doing what generally people do in those situations. Comic and life changing hijinks may have ensued on every one of those trips, but I wouldn’t know. The thought of working so hard for great grades that would get you into the finest schools and have them pay your way sounds now like something I should have done. Instead I had decent, if not very respectable grades (somewhere in the mid3’s, perhaps 3.3 or 3.4), nothing spectacular. I wish I could go back and tell myself to quit sports at an earlier age, or at least focus more on academic endeavors instead. I regret that everyday. No, really.
Attending UCSD only seems to have solidified that regret. Day in and day out I see fresh faced freshmen as they wander around campus seemingly free from any real responsibility. Sure they attend classes and hopefully pass them, but other than that, they seem for the most part lacking in accountability. The experience to them is not centered around their classes. For them they live in dorms, have study groups, parties in their rooms. They are encouraged rather vehemently to attend on campus activities after hours. They wander the malls of a city new to them in search of what would look great in their dorm room. They are thrust into a situation knowing few people at hand and forced to make new friends, new lives. Some do not adapt as well as others and do not have that trying yet wonderful experience. But for the most part, the majority of students seem to live a life of ease. Their freshman year they are walked through school and given every opportunity to get by. Leniency is granted although it may sound as if those granting it do not wish to.
By their sophomore year, they have made friendships that will last throughout their time at school and perhaps father into life. They have chosen roommates for off-campus housing and have a social network in which they can operate, often times as if nothing has changed since the first year of being together. They are no more adult than they were just one year before, but carry with them an air of being so because they feel more at home, more prepared than those incoming freshmen whose upcoming experience they may quietly envy. Come junior year, just two years from graduation, they’ve got it together and have settled into their social groove. Sure they will continue to make friends, but not at the rate and often the profundity of which they did those first two developing years.
Maybe it was that I dated Gina when she first went off to UC Riverside that I feel stuck between the two camps of transfer students with not comprehension of real college life and those entering freshmen naïve of the world presenting itself. She lived in the dorms and I visited frequently. It turned out to be too frequent and because of that, I ended up taking what amounted to a year off of school. But the one thing it showed me was the world of possibilities afforded the new freshmen. Life in the dorms was similar to how it is portrayed in movies and television, but it has a distinct quality about it that makes it seem so much more real to you. I went up there so regularly that people at the dorms knew me. I stayed the night repeatedly, occasionally several, that it came to the point that I felt I was almost the one enrolled.
Being from San Diego, Riverside was a new town to me. It may have been only a hundred miles away, but it could have been twenty times that for all I knew. Visiting as frequently as I did gave me the chance to explore the city for what it was. Discovering places to eat around the campus, shopping in a grocery store different from the one I went to for ten years prior. These experiences all seemed so wonderful, so full of life, that I wanted so bad for it to be me living them. No matter what the activity, be it going to a movie theater, making out in the back seat of a car, stumbling into Denny’s at three in the morning, it was different from the same experiences in my hometown. Working was never something I heard of when it came to freshmen. They had their living quarters paid for, they ate at the dining hall and some had allowances given to them by their parents. Time not spent in class could be spent sleeping, relaxing and generally enjoying college life.
Her following year, she and three other people from her dorm decided to get an apartment just off campus. Being only 19 and never having moved (outside of when I was 3), moving Gina in felt as if I too were. It was as if I was suddenly living a life not my own, in a place I had never been before. But I knew that it was not mine to live. The parties thrown throughout the complex and the frat and sorority life she partook in were far from what I did when I left for my home.
There it was working part time and going to a community college. A college devoid of social life; of real human interaction. There, the friends you made were more often acquaintances you had from high school that perhaps you hadn’t befriended very well back then. There were no dorms so therefore you were not forced to make new friends. In addition to that, a good ten to twenty percent of your classmates were well into their twenties, if not older. What kind of social interaction can you have as an 18 year old with a 35 year old mother of three who immediately after class has to pick up her baby from daycare and swing by the soccer practice to coach? Student activities are laughable on most community college campuses. The fact that they try to have events is almost pathetic and I personally believe those putting them on felt the same.
The toughest part, I truly and honestly believe, was the fact that I worked over thirty hours a week in addition to school. Instead of being able to enjoy my limited college life, my time off was spent at work. The blessing in disguise of where I found employment was that great deals of my co-workers were in the same community college boat I was. We formed a fraternity of sorts, in fact we even referred to it as such, through which we would hang out and go to parties. It was however, nothing remotely like it was just a hundred miles north for Gina. She worked for a total of two weeks at Mervyn’s before quitting in order to spend more time enriching her college experience. It was not like she was spoiled, though one may say she was, but she did not have the added pressure of making ends meet.
Now that I have transferred to UCSD, I am presented with a new world all to myself. It is that world I vicariously lived just a few years ago, but it is so vastly different from what I had experienced in those formative first two years of school. The school did not seem to care about my experiences, they did not offer any support to me in the area of academia. I was expected, naturally since I had already been in college, to perform as if I had already been going to UCSD for two years. I was expected to know the campus, to know the process for everything and to generally have my wits about me. In a way, the transfer process seems to be a sink or swim trial by fire. Either you grab hold of everything and run with it as best you can, or you fall behind and are perennially screwed.
Due in part to my family’s financial situation, I have to work in addition to going to school. By work I mean work 40 hours in addition to the 35 to 45 a week I spend on school and the assignments given. When asked by a professor of mine this quarter what time outside of class would be good for me to attend a demonstration, I had to tell her that there as no time. If I was not in class, I was at work and if I was not at work, I was in class. She said she did not understand which makes me think it’s not a popular thing this 40 hour work week. Regardless, I must make ends meet and go to school. It is not a situation I enjoy or even admire, but it is my own. It is my college experience.
When I read in the newspaper that transfer students were less likely to be involved in student activities and be less engaged with the faculty, I thought to myself “no shit.” Was that really a surprise to the survey? Was it to the newspaper? Is it to anyone? They spend at least two years working at a school that offers them next to nothing in the form of social culture, only to be thrust into a situation teeming with it. They are expected to make friends with people who have more than likely formed the bulk of their clique by the time they transfer over when they have even less exposure to them than they would have two years prior. It’s not for lack of effort on our part; it’s for lack of time. With everything we have to do, we must pick and choose what we take part in, who we spend time with and what we do on campus. Add to that a lot of transfer students generally do not live close to the campus and commuting becomes an issue of time. Throw in the fact that most of them also work off campus, they probably spend as much time driving to and from school and work as they do attending class.
At least I do.
What else I do is regret every day what I had done. There are saving graces and silver linings to every situation. As much as I would like to change the situation so that at least I had the opportunity to live that prototypical college life, I can’t. I have resigned myself to that fact and will forever regret it. I will not regret my current situation however, because for the most part I am happy. To be clichéd, you have to learn from your mistakes. My atonement will be giving my kids the chance I didn’t have.
We are all so very sorry...
1 Comments:
christ, you're wordy. i'm going to have to read this in chunks.
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