The most stressful part of transferring schools isn’t doing the common application all over again. It isn’t telling your old roommate – with whom you spent last semester picking out matching decorations – that it isn’t her, it’s you. It’s not even calling your old school three days into orientation because you forgot to withdraw two months ago. No, by far the most stressful part is the first week of classes. By which I mostly mean finding your way to those classes.
At first, I foolishly figured it wouldn’t be too bad. Coming from a school of over 5,000 students and 140 acres, how lost could I get on a campus that is three blocks long and one avenue wide? Plus, my non-transfer roommate and I could have our first bonding experience while she showed me to all my classrooms. On the first day, I would be able to walk tall (and fast, like a true New Yorker) and not awkwardly ask anyone for directions.
But this wasn’t factoring in two uniquely Barnard problems (though I already regret using that word because I know these “problems” are really going to be blessings for every instance past this one week): its use of Columbia’s campus and the shopping period. It took me a little too long to figure out why Kent Hall wasn’t showing up on my map of Barnard and then it took me longer to figure out how to get to Kent Hall once I located it on Columbia’s map. And while looking, I somehow ended up in Hamilton twice and Butler once. I was on an Easter egg hunt where the prize was unfortunately a two-hour lecture. And I couldn’t even blend in with the equally-lost first years because they had a semester’s worth of map investigation under their belt already.
As for shopping period: I can’t wait until I praise it for allowing me to figure out which professors I like best, because all it did this time was allow me to get lost on the way to nine different classes instead of four. I dropped all but one of the first five classes I went to and the ones I added to replace them were, of course, even farther away from my dorm or even more hidden deep within campus. And, in class, I couldn’t even pay attention to how much I liked the professor because I was using Google maps to figure out the path to my next lecture.
But now, I think I can safely say I’ve figured it out. I no longer have to plan an extra 20 minutes into my morning to factor in wandering, which my sleep schedule would greatly thank me for if it wasn’t used now for doing all the work that was assigned now that shopping period is over…