<p>The school is too diverse for you to get widespread resentment or care about a certain thing. People may just look at you and think “aren’t you hot” especially if you where such clothing in August/September (seriously, I recommend you just dress casually, or else you will be hot as hell. Do semi-formal or business casual, though I do recommend shorts, which can’t really be formal). Also, prestige doesn’t tell you about institutional character. Emory and Vanderbilt are way different in terms of atmosphere and character. Emory’s diversity kind of makes it so that you really need not fit any mold to feel comfortable other than some motivation to do well. Apparently, Vanderbilt has a reputation for being a bit preppy. That may play into how some transfers at Vandy are treated. Something tells me that students there are more into/conscience of the prestige of the institution to the point that they may fear how transfers fit into the equation (as in, some may think that they are less qualified because they would not have gotten in on the first go around). Some students at Emory are kind of prestige whores (the prestige whore effect, in general, kind of disappears once people are settled in), but they don’t worry themselves sick over every little detail contributing to it (and certainly don’t care about how their peers play into this. An Emory prestige whore literally only cares about the strength in the name or rank, and not what makes the name or rank so strong or even what justifies why somewhere else may have a better name. They simply care that it does. Hell could be a top 10 institution, and an Emory prestige whore would want to go. Luckily most here are at most only prestige whore enough to be happy with Emory’s level of prestige), and the environment is a little to laid back for people to treat a transfer student differentially based upon the mere fact that they are a transfer. Overall, I would say that the student body is too laid back socially and too busy academically to care. The best way to easily make friends is to take smaller classes and try to connect with the others academically. If you are, in say, a humanities or social sciences class, and you add to discussion, people will respect you, and if the topic is interesting, they will likely discuss it outside of class and that’s where you begin to connect. We had a couple of transfers in my religion class, and we liked them fine (the class sparked awesome conversations in and out of class and the members were quite close). As another anecdote to comfort you, I’ve frequently heard conversations among Emory students like: “Do you know this girl named X?” and someone will respond, “Oh, aren’t they that cool transfer student…?” Basically, most here care about sociability than academic preparation of their peers. Transfer resentment normally occurs when students are conscious/or overly caring about the academic credentials (as in HS credentials) of incoming students. We simply don’t care about this. By time you’re here, this is completely irrelevant and most people recognize this. Also, the thing about the professors being conscious of it does not happen at Emory. The professors don’t really care where you come from and if you tell them, they may actually be happy. I know in the sciences, transfers are often better liked than some of the freshman admits because they know they came here for a change and will likely put in more effort, or merely, care more than freshman admits about learning. After making several transfer friends and watching them in upper division courses, I think their hunch is correct (transfers seem less timid overall. For example, most freshman admits would not be a biology major taking an upperdivision chemistry elective. It is more common to see transfers do this, and they do well).</p>