No one said that attending an Ivy League school would be easy. The Cornell student body includes some of the best and brightest eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds in the country. The University doesn’t accept just anyone, nor does it take us by the hand and give us a degree. We have to earn it.
But as demanding as Cornell’s academics are to the average undergrad, they’re even more challenging to a transfer student. For one thing, we often start out in upper-level courses, since we’ve already taken the prerequisites. Another difference is that good grades earned during our first years of college don’t count; even though we had respectable GPAs at our previous schools—high enough to win admission to Cornell—they don’t factor into our cumulative averages. And transfers have to hit the ground running; when you’re here for only half as long, each semester counts twice as much, so one bad grade can derail your GPA.
Then there are the social obstacles: it’s hard to feel as if you belong when your peers have had two years to develop friendships. They found their “besties” long before I arrived, the new kid on the block as a junior. Coming to Cornell was like butting in on people mid-conversation.
When I matriculated at Cornell—2,800 miles away from home—I had an associate’s degree. And as hard as it would have been to transfer from another four-year university, there’s even more culture shock when you come from a community college. Earning an associate’s degree was similar to a job; after class, you drove home. There was little incentive to be socially active at a commuter school. Community college just seemed like a bigger version of high school.
Inevitably, your college experience is not the same when you are only on the Hill for two years. I’m sure I missed out on many experiences by not being an underclassman at Cornell—and that I can vouch for many transfers when I say that I wish I’d been here for four years. But sometimes the journey is less important than the destination. After all, we transfers made it here—right?
— Tim Weisberg ’12