Interestingly enough, the saga of my transfer student status begins and ends with a hospital. But, we’ll get to that.
The record of physical evidence for my time at Dartmouth is fragmented: Dartmouth apparel gathers dust in my closet, my parents will never see that check for $63,000 again and stray free credits mark my transcript (some courses, like my art history class, didn’t transfer, but I don’t regret taking it—it's how often Goya comes up in everyday conversation).
After my freshman year, I transferred from Dartmouth to Penn, which makes me a statistical anomaly: only a couple dozen students transfer out of the smallest Ivy League a year. I didn’t enter Dartmouth intending to transfer, but instead matriculated as an excited, wide-eyed freshman. Like many other students, the end of August after senior year of high school could not come quickly enough. Dartmouth, habitually on its own schedule, did not start until mid-September, which left me at home longer than my high school friends.
My initial weeks at Dartmouth were bliss. September in New Hampshire is the opposite of most other months in New Hampshire—it’s temperate, and the leaves turn a panoply of colors. I partook in a Dartmouth tradition akin to PennQuest, a four-day kayaking expedition into the heart of the New Hampshire wilderness. I bonded with my hall mates and went out with them in the ridiculously large groups that unfailingly denote freshmen.
Even after the promising start to my life at Dartmouth, I had a visceral feeling that something wasn’t right. The first couple months at college, I understood, were not supposed to be problem-free; it takes a while to get to know people and get adjusted. My malaise stemmed from structural problems—it was not the people at Dartmouth but the institutions in place with which I had qualms. I was bored—always looking for something to do but never being able to find it in the tiny town of Hanover. Weekend nights blended together—there was no equivalent to Smokes, and no such thing as a downtown in a place whose main street only had a J. Crew and a Starbucks.
One weekend in early November, friends from Harvard came to Dartmouth to visit. We ended up heading to a party—which in Dartmouth parlance amounted to a night of pong in a musty basement. Riveting. Without my realizing, one of my friends from Harvard had become so drunk that we were forced to call the Dartmouth equivalent of MERT to take him to the hospital. It hit me suddenly: we had drunk ourselves into oblivion to find entertainment in a place where there was little else going on. Although I had been cognizant of the sorry state of social life before, that one moment crystallized my burgeoning belief that I could not spend four years at Dartmouth.
The question very quickly evolved from “what can I do” to “where should I transfer.” I grew up in South Jersey and often used Philadelphia as short-hand notation for where I was from, which was both a matter of convenience and a ploy—a major city sounds a hell of a lot better than Jersey. My first time applying to school, I had written Penn off as too close to home, but on second examination, it met my criteria: it was (roughly) a peer institution—shout out to US News and World Report for rankings—was larger than Dartmouth, and was located in a major city. By April, I was committed to Penn.
Very few decisions I’ve made in my life have been better than my decision to transfer. Uprooting yourself after a year isn’t easy, but Penn has been welcoming. My anxiety that I would not like Penn just as much as I didn’t like Dartmouth gradually subsided, as I immersed myself in the Penn community. At Penn, there is too much to do—always events or opportunities for a diverse and fulfilling social and academic life. Thankfully for me, people empathized with my relative isolation as a transfer— I was more reliant on student organizations to foster meaningful relationships, and everyone understood.
I was also reliant, it seems, on some good medical advice. After swallowing a beer bottle cap in March, I was advised to take a stroll down to the emergency room out of fears of a hemorrhaged digestive track. Fifteen minutes upon sending the mandatory snapchats of my hospital bracelet and x-rays of my stomach, a friend I had known for a couple months made the trek to the hospital and spent the rest of the early morning with me, remaining in my company in discharge.
I’ve learned that happiness at college is contingent on community, on people who are willing to listen to you, provide support for your problems and tell you when you’ve done something stupid—and yes, this includes swallowing a bottle cap.
Surprisingly, it was two moments involving hospitals that crystallized my experiences at the respective schools. Penn is a special place, a concentration of talented, ambitious people, even if that ambition bears baggage. And even if my freshman year wasn't ideal, at the very least, I got a shit ton of Dartmouth clothing out of my freshman year.
