Before the spring 2023 semester, I transferred from the University of Hawaii at Manoa to Appalachian State University. I took a year off of school because of unfortunate circumstances and was leaving a university I had been attending for the first two and a half years of my college education (most of the time admittedly being online because of the pandemic). In all truthfulness, I didn’t even know what the Appalachian mountains were until I was searching for colleges in North Carolina with majors that interested me. I was naive about the process and had no idea what to expect in moving from one extreme to another, and had to learn as I went. Now I hope to share that experience with you.
I had the opportunity to attend UH Manoa for the beginning of my college education, but my time came to an end and I had to figure out what I was going to do. Where was my next and hopefully, final university? My family was moving back to North Carolina so that is where I had to look for In-state tuition because as we all know, college is too expensive.
Once I decided on Appalachian State, the process of the transfer began. Applying to the App State was easy enough, but that’s where I learned my first lesson. Patience. Patience is something that does not come easily to me, especially when it comes to important things such as college with serious and set deadlines that need to be met. Once you apply, get accepted, and send transcripts as well as all the other documents that are needed, there’s nothing else you can do. The process is out of your hands and all you can do is wait for the school to communicate on their own. And waiting for one university to deliver transcripts to another is like watching paint dry.
While patience is a virtue, it is also important to stay updated. Staying on top of all the documents like credit transfers, credit petitions, health forms, and housing applications, and communicating with the other university is tough, especially when the university you’re trying to email is six hours behind the one you currently attend.
There is also the issue of having three emails. The email that you put on your transfer application, the first university email, and the new one you get when you are accepted as a transfer. There are so many emails with important information in three different places. One of my friends who transferred out of App State didn’t check their new college email because they didn’t even know there was another one, and they fell behind on credit transferring and registering for their classes for the coming semester. A checklist or calendar is essential to keep track of this period until everything is put together.
Outside of documentation and the paper part of transferring, the struggles with change were also a source of major anxiety for me. I had never been to App State before and my first visit was only a few weeks before the semester started. I have never lived so far inland, not to mention so far from my parents. There was that familiar fear of the unknown that made me feel like a freshman, just out of high school, stepping into the real world for the first time. I felt like all eyes would be on me, waiting for me to fail at this new college.
It’s no secret that App State would be nothing like UH Manoa and I might struggle to navigate this new place. Even the weather was a source of anxiety because, for the past three years, I had been in a state where the temperature rarely dipped below 69 degrees at night in the winter. I had to learn to calm myself from these fears that I was going to be all alone when I was sure there would be other new students transferring or starting college that spring semester. Just simple research and finding out more about Boone and App State itself was essential to ease that existential dread.
The anxiety of beginning at App State in the spring semester was the biggest source of my anxiety because it wasn’t the beginning of the school year. I was in the middle of the fall and spring semesters so there wouldn’t be the same wave of new students that there would normally be. I had that deep-rooted fear of becoming an outcast and being seen as a stranger in this institution against all common sense. Who would I sit with in class? Was I going to sit and eat in the dining hall alone? Would I make any friends at all? All these fears ran around in my head and created this heavy feeling of loneliness before I even got to App State. I know zero people here, but I was determined to try and put myself out there. That’s the biggest lesson I learned in my experience, to just TRY. Unfortunately, my roommate was never in the room so becoming besties with her was out the window so I had to try a different approach.
I worked up the courage to go to the club expo a few weeks into the semester and put my name down for a few. Some I didn’t even end up going to their first meetings but there were two that I did, and it changed my life here. I made friends, I found outlets for stress (writing for HerCampus,)!), and now when I look back I know simply putting myself out there was one of the best decisions I’ve made since applying to transfer to App State.