truth

New transfer students know all of the usual freshman advice-- lock your door, go to office hours, join a club, etc. But transferring is different from starting as a freshman.

Do past transfer students have any advice specifically for incoming transfers to Brown?

-truth

ClaySoul

Go to all the transfer orientation events, and meet your fellow transfers. Most of your friends will probably be transfers.

Beyond that, join a lot of clubs and meet everyone in your dorm.

icebox4

OP: that's an awesome nickname.

take hard classes and suffer together with your classmates. best way to bond. or just get trashed on weekends, then you'll be all set.

4 more weeks to Brown, wheeeeee~

mgcsinc

lol, 'lock your door' is part of the usual freshman advice?

ClaySoul

Hahah, sure, locking your door = good

Not that I ever did...

Anyways, I'm going to reiterate my advice that the best thing to do is to get very involved, academically, extra curricularly, and socially. Meet your profs, get to know some deans, get involved in clubs, meet your neighbors, etc.

It is hard to be a transfer, but there are a lot of things you can do to make it easier. I joined rugby and Zete (one of the co-ed frats -- a very nontraditional frat...more of an anti-frat than a frat, really) and met all my frosh neighbors, which in addition to meeting all the transfers, really helped socially. I also have a dean that I see regularly, and got to know some professors. All that will help you out a lot!

It's kind of like freshman year all over again, but you need to take more initiative to create things for yourself.

truth

Thanks Clay, ice.

Clay: You said that most of your friends were other transfers. Is this just because there were more opportunities to meet them during orientation? Or are non-transfers caught up in their own groups?

ClaySoul

It's both. The non-transfer groups are friendly, but in most cases, harder to "penetrate." They are doing their own thing. You may get lucky and have some people in your dorm that go out of their way to welcome the new kid. You may not, and have to forge the connections on your own. If you do the latter, you may find yourself with a wider group of friends. That said, there's nothing wrong with just having transfer friends as well. My trasnfer friends were all very tight knight, and in a way, it was a negative that i had so many other groups of friends because i didn't get to know any one group all that well.

That said, I should clairfy. I play rugby and lived in a freshman dorm, so I had a lot of friends and activities through those avenues, as well as through the transfers. Most transfers don't join as close, open, and actively social a group as rugby or live in a freshman dorm, etc, and generally live around other transfers, which only solidifies the connection between them.

So in other words, most transfers find themselves friends mostly with other transfers because they are in the same circumstance and live near each other. But if you go out of your way, you can expand your friend base substantially.