Tim Lehman found out he’d been admitted as a transfer student to Syracuse University – the only school he applied to – in early July 2008. That gave the now junior public relations major less than a month before he needed to move from his home in Germany, leave his friends at The American International University in London, and arrive at his new school.

‘Fingers crossed, it was a long summer to wait to hear,’ he said.

Lehman, a British-American citizen, had never lived in the United States before deciding to transfer from his 1,000-student liberal arts university to SU. For him, the already difficult transfer process was further complicated by his late acceptance and being an international student.

Although transfer student-only orientation events, a learning community, and a mentor program in its infancy exist, faculty and recent transfers to SU agree that more attention needs to be paid to the transfer population.

As of now, no resource center or clear program exists for transfer students after they’ve been accepted. Like other students, the Office of Housing, Meal Plan and I.D. Card Services, the Office of Orientation and Off-Campus Programs, and individual colleges deal with individual aspects of the integration process.

But that will change when the Office of Orientation and Off-Campus Programs splits in two – with the office handling orientation to include transfer students in its new name, said Interim Director, Darya Rotblat.

‘If you look at some of the things our colleagues are doing in and around the area, we need to do better,’ said Michele Pipas, assistant director of admissions and transfer recruitment coordinator. ‘And since I’ve arrived, about a year ago, there is recognition from the chancellor on down to the schools and colleges themselves that we need to do more for transfer students.’

In fall 2008, SU settled in 318 students, Pipas said. For spring 2009, 106 new students were admitted. Under the umbrella term of ‘first-year student,’ a term that many in the transfer community condemn, transfer students are typically paired with the incoming freshman class for orientation and opening week events.

When the office change occurs, Eileen Simmons, director of Housing, Meal Plan and I.D. Card Services, said she hopes it could be the one-stop shop to answer all transfer questions.

‘Every transfer student is extremely different and extremely unique,’ Pipas said. ‘Right now, I’m dealing with a population of students that are being discharged from the military that are looking to come to school. I’ve got students that are now looking to go to college because they’ve been laid off from their jobs. There’s nothing scripted.’

Admission in limbo

Unlike the freshman class, which is admitted on a strict timetable, transfer students can apply throughout the year and be admitted to the school at any time, Pipas said.

Transfers begin receiving acceptance notifications as early as mid-February, and every few weeks throughout the summer, more are admitted. It’s a rolling admissions process that quickens in the spring.

‘We literally continue to accept students right up to opening weekend. And that is especially true for transfer students who come in the spring,’ Pipas said. ‘We are faced with the challenges of the semester ending, holidays, schools being closed for break and then receiving transcripts in a timely fashion.’

Pipas said that when admitting transfer students, the admissions committee looks beyond academics to consider students’ individual circumstances.

Jaclyn Terriaca, a sophomore advertising major, was accepted to SU and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications when she was a senior in high school. But she chose to attend New York University for her freshman year and was unhappy with her situation in the city.

After reactivating her application on Jan. 1, Terriaca waited to hear from admissions.

She was supposed to hear back May 1, but when she called the admissions office a few days later, she was told no one had looked at her application.

The next day, she received another call.

‘They said ‘We’re sorry. It was a mistake. You’ve been accepted,” Terriaca said. ‘Everything seemed normal and then in mid-July, I was told that there was no housing.’

Running out of room

Like Terriaca, Lehman didn’t hear about the housing situation until it was almost too late.

When Lehman received his acceptance letter, the deadline for on-campus housing had passed nearly two months earlier. He didn’t know. And the university cannot guarantee housing for transfers, Pipas said.

‘We would manage a freshman over a transfer,’ Simmons said. ‘What typically happens in a given June is there’s no more space. We have folks that will call us desperate to say ‘we came up and looked. We drove five hours and spent the weekend looking; we’re not pleased with what we saw for my student. Can you help me?’ It’s desperation and it’s awful.’

After being admitted, Lehman didn’t hear from SU for weeks – no e-mails, phone calls or mail. When he finally made the effort to find out exactly where he was living, his calls were shuttled from one office to another and, after 30 minutes on hold, Lehman found out that he would need to find his own housing – with three weeks remaining before he moved to the States.

‘I found out rather late that I was accepted,’ Lehman said. ‘I kept e-mailing people and they kept forwarding my e-mails to other people. I was basically saying ‘Hi, I’m coming to SU from Germany and I don’t know where I’m going to live. What’s the housing situation?’ And people kept pushing me off, giving me different phone extensions. This is not just over a day; this is over a week, two weeks. Which, over the summer, when I’m sitting there with a six-hour time difference, it took up a lot of time.’

Searching independently, Lehman found a house on Ostrom Avenue with one vacant room. He didn’t know where Ostrom was or whether it was close to campus or not, but went into his new living situation open-minded.

‘I know a good 10, 15, 20 people that didn’t end up coming here because they weren’t told in time that there was no housing,’ he said. ‘I know other people who transferred here and lived in the Sheraton first semester or lived down in the Parkview Hotel. They’ve now moved in with other friends. But they lived in a hotel first semester because SU couldn’t get their act together.’

As of Aug. 21, 2008, there were 101 transfer students living on campus for the fall semester, Simmons said.

Currently the Office of Residence Life offers a Transfer Learning Community located in two Slocum Heights apartment buildings. Next year, one of the SkyHall buildings, also located on South Campus, will dedicate 64 beds for transfer students. Rotblat said she believes this will allow for more events specifically geared toward the transfer population.

‘It’s very exciting from a programming standpoint,’ Rotblat said. ‘We will have space to set up a mentor program because really, never before has there been that much space for all the transfer students.’

Moving forward

Nina Roefaro spent her first year at SU in her South Campus apartment, alone. Her roommate moved to North Campus halfway through the year and, not knowing anyone, Roefaro was stuck.

On Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, she worked in the studio trying to keep her head above water with her interior design coursework. And if she made it through, she vowed to create the sense of community for transfer students that she never felt.

‘It was really bad,’ said Roefaro, a senior interior design major who transferred in fall 2006. ‘It was a really hard thing to get through and not knowing anyone. There were never events for transfers. There was never a resource center. I was kind of stuck and didn’t know what to do. I almost wished someone from housing would e-mail me or call me and say ‘we saw there was a vacancy.”

After receiving an associate’s degree in graphic design from a community college in Utica, N.Y., she wanted to continue her undergraduate work. Financially and geographically, Syracuse worked.

Like many transfer students, Roefaro was placed in a South Campus apartment. Coming in as a sophomore – though technically a junior – dorm life wasn’t appealing. But, as just another apartment dweller, she felt overlooked.

‘Just knowing what it’s like to be friendless (is the hardest part),’ she said. ‘Not friendless in the sense of an extreme – I have friends at home and family- but here, I really didn’t feel that way. I didn’t really have anyone that I knew. It was a totally different place in a totally lonely apartment.’

Roefaro’s plan to create a community for transfer students began during her second year at SU. Through networking and friends in her major, she sought out transfers who were unhappy with their current situations and offered them her assistance. From her experience, she’s become a resource for other transfers and an advocate for the creation of transfer programs.

She invented her own position within the South Campus Organization for Programming Excellence: The position of Vice President of the Transitional Experience, which interacts with transfer students and Rotblat’s office to implement programs mainly on South Campus.

‘Certain things I can tell are making a huge difference, and it’s exciting,’ Roefaro said. ‘It took about a year to send the e-mails, make the phone calls, to meet the people, meet the students, and to just get something from nothing.’

A pilot transfer mentor program is currently in the works, which was one of Roefaro’s ideas. Assimilated transfers act as mentors for new transfer students – similar to the peer advising programs offered by many colleges, but on a more personal level, Rotblat said. In its first semester, there were seven students who signed up to have mentors.

‘Important people (in the Office of Residence Life) are getting involved, and for me to see that is a total dream,’ Roefaro said. ‘To give transfer students the ability to have a positive transition is huge.’

kmimamur@syr.edu

Published on January 26, 2009 at 12:00 pm