Freshman Julia Rohm-Ensing came to Northwestern with high hopes. She took part in floor government and tried to be as friendly as possible. “I expected I’d love college,” she said. Still, Rohm-Ensing said she barely knew anyone when she was walking around Northwestern’s 8,000-person campus. “I felt lost.”
Last October, Rohm-Ensing began looking to get out. She applied to transfer to DePauw University, and by January, she was an enrolled student. “Northwestern students are a lot more competitive than they are [at DePauw],” she said. “[Northwestern] was everything I thought it would be; it just didn’t fit with my personality the way I thought it would.”
Increasingly fewer students are transferring out of NU: this year’s retention rate of 97 percent is up from the 95 percent rate of the 2000-2001 school year. But Rohm-Ensing and 79 other freshmen won’t be returning for their sophomore years.
Then there are the students applying to transfer to Northwestern. In 2000, only 529 students applied to transfer to NU. For the 2007-2008 year, nearly double that number, 1,039, applied to transfer in. Last fall, 142 transfer students moved to campus.
Many transfers see changing schools as a second chance for happiness. Unsatisfied with their previous situations, they seek out different environments, usually enrolling in schools which are significantly different in size. Sometimes — but not always — the change delivers the “fit” transfer students are seeking.
“Getting out and giving myself a chance to start over was the right decision for me,” Rohm-Ensing said. At DePauw, a school of only about 2,500 undergraduates, she found her place. Her largest class has only 30 people and is “a little more personal.”
Anna Blumberg, a Weinberg junior, transferred to NU this year from Bates College, a small, rural liberal arts college in Maine. Blumberg thought she’d like a school where she knew everyone, but that wasn’t the case.
“You never really know until you go somewhere,” she said. “First semester freshman year, I knew I wanted to get of that place,” she said. “I hated my other college, just hated it.”
Northwestern was Blumberg’s original first choice college, but she was rejected as a freshman. When she transferred, she said she liked the people, but found it difficult to make friends.
Blumberg’s friends were mostly residents of the 48-person Transfer House, a residence hall for first-year transfers located in the fraternity quads. With a patio and a ping-pong table in the center of the common room, it’s homey. A cluster of warm, brown chairs and sofas fill a far corner and a Coke machine hums and glows opposite.
“Even outside [Transfer House], you tend to find other transfers,” said Cristina Johnson a Weinberg sophomore who transferred from Palm Beach Community College. “But we’re just very comfortable hanging out with just each other.”
Although happy at DePauw, Rohm-Ensing said that being a transfer is inherently a strange position.
“Transferring was rough,” Rohm-Ensing said. “People know each other already.” To meet new people, she sought out extracurricular activities, and ended up joining a sorority and acting in a play (Northwestern, she said, is so specialized that someone who isn’t a theater major finds it difficult to find a place on the stage).
Junior Nancy Sim, another resident of Transfer House, called the Northwestern social system “cliquish.” She, like many others, transferred to NU because of its academic prestige. But Sim, who transferred from UC San Diego, found that because most upperclassmen have a set group of friends, trying to select classes and find people to study with was more difficult.
Sim admitted that she doesn’t go to many parties. “Even if there’s something going on in the [frat] quads, I choose not to go,” she said.
Johnson felt that the heavy emphasis on academics limits her ability to participate in extracurricular activities. “It’s stressful, just stressful,” she said.
Extracurricular activities are pivotal in meeting new people, said Eric Slepak, the Transfer House president. He’s noticed the insular nature of Transfer House, but said he hasn’t been as affected as others. He joined Phi Kappa Psi and “had some friends who’d gotten in as freshmen.”
Ultimately, Slepak said, “It’s about how much you put yourself out there.”
Slepak, like Blumberg, applied to Northwestern as a freshman, but was initially rejected. In order to prove to himself that he could get in, he applied to transfer. The second try paid off.
Now, Slepak is active in restructuring Wildcat Welcome Week for transfers. He plans to consolidate Essential NU into a single seminar. “The point of [transfer students'] orientation shouldn’t be to ease their way into college, because they’ve done it already, but to emphasize what’s unique about Northwestern.”
Though Slepak is working to make transferring a less difficult adjustment, it still hasn’t panned out for some.
“If I had to do it over again, I don’t know,” Johnson said. She said she finds the quarter system too difficult to really enjoy the other aspects of college.
Sim now realizes that UC Berkeley would have been the perfect school for her, but she won’t be transferring again. “[Another transfer] is not really in your mind. By the time you’re a junior, you just want to get out of there,” Sim said.
But for Rohm-Ensing, transferring was the right decision. “Things are falling into place,” she said, “I don’t even want to leave.”