I started my freshman year of college as a dorming student at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. In the fall of 2019, I left home to dorm at school only to realize the next semester I would be back home. My dorm had a communal bathroom- which I was not the biggest fan of- but even worse was my roommate. We were not compatible at all and living with her was like hell. All I had ever wanted to do was to go away and live at college, but after that first semester my dreams were slowly crushed.
I started looking for schools on Long Island that I could commute to. I applied as a transfer student to Hofstra and Adelphi, even though I live 50 minutes away. I knew it would be a long commute, but I could still do it. Ultimately, I decided on Adelphi because of their education program.
Coming home wasn’t an easy decision for me; I tried to stay at my first school, but ultimately it wasn’t going to happen. I agonized over the decision to move home because doing it made me feel like a failure. I wanted so badly to live on my own, and there I felt like I couldn’t handle it. Ultimately, I realized that even if I felt like a failure in the moment, this is how things were meant to be.
I started my freshman spring semester at Adelphi and was there for a month and a half before the inevitable happened; Covid shut down the school and I was no longer physically commuting to campus. I hadn’t really met anyone or made friends on campus before the closure. I was at this school for a month, I knew no one, and then I was forced to be separated from everyone.
It sucked to have just started at a new school where I had few connections, only to be put in a position where I felt more isolated from the university. Unfortunately, I still haven’t been able to make the connections that I had hoped to because of the pandemic.
Being a transfer student is already hard because you are basically starting fresh with a clean state. You have to put yourself out there with new people again and that is even harder when you aren’t even on campus. I feel like I transferred at the absolute worst time, it has been so hard to adjust to a new school given the difficulties of the pandemic. I still feel like I am not connected to the school even though I have been putting in more of an effort to get involved.
I’ve been unhappy with my decision to transfer ever since I started the application process. A part of me wonders what would have happened if I had stayed at Seton Hall even though the pandemic would’ve screwed that up too. But I know that I was meant to transfer despite the personal failure that came along with it.
When the world finally gets back to normal and I can really be on campus, I hope to be involved so I can finally meet and connect with people. I also might live on campus and see what happens from there. I didn’t like living at my first school, but it doesn’t mean I won’t like living at Adelphi- and to be honest, I don’t think I could hate anything more than the 50 minute commute.