At this time last year, I was agonizing about which school I should choose to go to: University of Florida or Penn State.
Neither were my first choice. University of Southern California was, and still is, my dream school for years, but I was rejected. Literally the only reason I applied to UF was because of the warm weather, and Penn State was a last minute panic-induced application after being deferred from a school I considered my safety school.
After touring the handful of colleges I got into, I was able to narrow it down to those two. Ultimately, Penn State captured my heart. The campus was gorgeous, and my best friend would be going there. Their academics were also ranked higher and they had a better reputation overall. On the other hand, the winters were brutal – UF didn’t have that problem. I could still see myself going to UF even if it wasn’t ranked as high.
At the end of the day, I ended up choosing UF. Weather was a huge factor for me; even though it seems petty to choose one school over the other solely for the warmth, I knew I would be miserable in the cold. The fact that I’d have a room to myself was a cherry on top. At Penn State, I would have had to share a room with seven other girls.
Both of my teachers who tried to help me when I was split between the two gave me the same advice: “There is no wrong choice.”
They were wrong.
There absolutely is a wrong choice.
Maybe UF wasn’t the wrong choice between the two of those schools, but in the long run, it was the wrong choice for me.
I hold a 3.97 from last semester and I am doing even better in my classes this semester (even the class considered a “weed-out). I just won an undergraduate writing award for an essay I wrote in my English class. My Facebook wall is a plethora of club-related events I have shared. If you were to try to gauge my happiness from these things, you’d probably suspect that I love my school. I’m involved and I’m thriving academically, look at me go! Transfer students are typically profiled as having poor grades and being uninvolved.
If that is indeed the case, I’m certainly an outlier.
Yes, my grades are high, but it’s not because the classes are too easy for me. They’re actually pretty difficult and I work my ass off for them. Yes, I’m pretty involved in my club. I was promoted from the lowliest team to a better team because of how involved I was first semester.
So if that’s the case – if I am succeeding so well at this school in both academics and extracurricular activities – why transfer? Why not continue this pattern of success for the next three years, stay at the top of my class, and leave with no debt?
It’s because I’m pretty unhappy here, and I guess I do a decent job masking it.
I don’t really have any close friends. I have friends that I grab lunch with after class, but none of them really know me. I’m not the first person that anyone asks to hang out with, and maybe that’s my fault. But the connections I have formed here are far from meaningful, yet I sit back and watch all of my classmates get wasted on Friday nights and return with crazy stories on Monday.
Most importantly, my school has a certain culture that does not fit with me as a person. There are 50,000 students. A whopping 97 percent of this student body is from Florida, leaving only 3 percent from out-of-state. I can count the number of people I have met who aren’t originally from Florida on one hand. Greek life is huge here. It’s the SEC. Southern schools have a reputation for having extremely large, developed Greek cultures. I didn’t realize until I went here and instantly felt like I was being suffocated by the amount of frat boys talking about getting drunk during class and being caught behind a group of sorority girls talking about their “date functions.”
What really has tipped the boat is the amount of bigoted attitudes I have witnessed. In just this semester alone, a man wearing a Swastika has waltzed onto campus, Islamophobic and anti-black graffiti has appeared in classrooms, and our student body president has not been held accountable for drunkenly attempting grand theft auto down in Key West over Spring break.
Yes, there were protests against the Nazi led by the students. Yes, one could argue that it’s important to be immersed into viewpoints that aren’t your own, or that these acts are from an extremely small minority. What bothers me is that these incidents aren’t isolated. These are a handful of different incidents, and the administration has done little to nothing in order to condemn them.
Maybe these factors could have been tolerable had they been alone. Maybe I could have tolerated the acts of bigotry if I had close friends, or maybe I could tolerate having no group of tight-knit friends if there were more out-of-state and less Greek life students. However, this isn’t the case. They have added up, and I have found myself longing for transfer more every day.
Not everything about UF is terrible, though. I don’t hate it here. These are just some of the things that get on my nerves. I’m actually grateful for the experiences I have had here, and I’m not sure that I would have grown in the same direction had I chosen Penn State instead.
My academic experiences at UF have been superb and led me to realize what I really wanted out of life and my career. The arduous internal struggles and loneliness that plagued me in my first semester led me to be more resilient and become a stronger person when I finally got through it in the end. I wouldn’t take anything back. Maybe I did make the wrong choice, but I don’t have any regrets.
If I do end up transferring, I’ll look back at my experiences here with a smile on my face. UF will always hold a place in my heart, even if I am trying to transfer. If nothing works out and I stay here for the next three years, it’s not the end of the world either.
No matter what, remember that it is OK to transfer. Don’t let anyone’s judgments deter you from pursuing the path that you believe fits you better. Half of undergraduate students in America transfer at some point in their academics, so you aren’t alone.
