Last summer, in a meeting with a transfer advisor at Brown, I asked how long he thought it would take me to socially integrate at the school. I had just finished my freshman year at Columbia, and I was anxious at the prospect of starting over completely. “Oh, never,” he said. “When you’re a transfer, it’s a permanent part of your experience, of your identity. You should never lose that.”
By default, Brown is uniquely suited to accept and accommodate transfers. The Open Curriculum means transfer students are unburdened by distributional credits or core classes, enabling them to pick up where they left off at their former school and integrate into the general population in classes and degree progress. The 70 or so transfer students that come to Brown each year arrive having already completed at least one full year of college and, by extension, having already adjusted to the realities of college life. The ultimate goal of transferring, then, is to both academically and socially integrate into your new peer group as quickly as possible. After all, transfers leave to join the whole school, not just those who decided to jump their respective ships at the same time. Brown’s Open Curriculum helps make this easier. Its transfer infrastructure makes it near impossible.
My transfer advisor’s sentiment — that being a transfer is a personality trait and not an interim label — pervades nearly every other aspect of the process. From housing to orientation to social exposure, Brown’s philosophy attempts to create a strong, insular community of transfers, who in the first weeks of school have reliable, relatable groups with which they can bond. But in practice, the approach creates a series of programs that stick transfers with a hard-to-shake “other” label, pushing an already socially disadvantaged group further to the fringes of social life at the school.
The most glaring example of this comes in transfer dorm assignments. As it stands, the vast majority of transfers are, depending on the year, housed in one of the New Pembroke dorms. Situated in a freshman quad at the northern tip of campus, these dorms are as far from most sophomore and junior housing as possible. For the four days of orientation, this arrangement gives transfers the opportunity to share close quarters and make easy connections with fellow newcomers. Once the school year proper starts, however, the housing serves to alienate transfers, who quickly find they have virtually no physical proximity to peers in their grade level.
All orientation programming, for that matter, is formed along the same logical lines. Fall semester transfers are carefully ushered around campus to different informational sessions and mixers, always kept separate from incoming first-years — even more so from traditional students of the same year who may be on campus already. The orientation programming is nearly identical to a freshman orientation. But where incoming first-years form groups out of thousands, able to shuffle their friends and lives until something fits, transfers are left in an isolated world of double digits.
When I first decided to transfer to Brown, a recent alum told me that there were usually only a handful of transfers who “make it out of the bubble.” I’ve found my people at Brown. I love this school, and I’m so grateful for the life it’s allowed me to build. So many of my fellow transfers, it’s important to note, do manage to make the jump toward total social integration. But our good fortune is much more the result of outrageous luck — generous friends from home, club acceptances and chance run-ins — than intelligent planning on behalf of the Brown administration.
Creating a transfer community is not in and of itself a bad thing. But creating an iron-clad one means that, after a couple months, the insularity can feel insurmountable. It’s like meeting a group of friends at A Day On College Hill and being told that they are the only ones you’ll be grouped with for the entire year.
Transferring is supposed to be hard. Transfers are, as the Brown website so graciously declares, “willing to take the path less traveled to arrive at a better place.” But must that path be so poorly maintained? Even one simple fix — changing transfer housing policies — would do so much to improve the starting social position of transfers.
Think of the ways you might’ve met your friends in your first year at Brown: in dorms, at orientation and in classes. The connecting fiber of college life is casual friendships — it’s friends who will invite you to a party or ask to get lunch every few weeks or forget your name at said party. This aspect of college life is built in late-night bathroom conversations with the folks you meet on your floor and awkward orientation ice breakers. Under the current system, it’s an aspect of college life that transfer students don’t get the chance to build.
Rather than placing transfers in their own designated dorm, transfers should instead be scattered throughout dorms of students in their same year. A few doubles on each floor of predominantly sophomore and junior dorms should be removed from the housing lottery and be randomly assigned to transfer students upon admission. Shared hallways and bathrooms are, at the very least, the right starting point to establish a much-needed infrastructure for transfers to build the strong-ish bonds that hold college life together.
This change isn’t a fix-all — it’s one small step. But the fundamental approach Brown takes towards transfers must change. The University owes it to its transfers, us few students who pack up our lives on a whim based on the promise of a better life, to make our worlds as big as possible. The label of “transfer student” should be a temporary tag, not an identifying feature.
Oscar Noxon ’27 can be reached at oscar_noxon@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
