Steady Ground to stand on: a TCU transfer student's experience

Is any future ever worth sacrificing your past?

To varying degrees, this is a question that has remained prevalent throughout history, from people who willfully leave their past behind and immigrate into countries in search of future employment to people who have their pasts forcibly erased in order to be sold into a future of enslavement.

One context it can be seen in today is the college experience, where young people embark on a quest of “transformation” often far away from home where they will go in as naïve, immature teenagers and come out an educated, employment-ready adult. It’s something I think about as I’ve endlessly debated, decided and re-decided on whether or not to transfer out of a school that I don’t feel I fully belong to. I dream about brighter futures I could make for myself, the belonging I could find at a place that’s more “meant for me,” yet I simultaneously fear leaving what connections I’ve made behind and ending up somewhere that could be worse.

In a school that’s so small that it feels like everyone knows each other, what is it like to transfer in two years late, and is it possible to find home in a place everyone else got to first?

Samantha Goldblatt is a senior student at Texas Christian University majoring in English and minoring in critical race and ethnic studies. Originally attending Tarrant County College’s Trinity River campus, she transferred to TCU for her junior and senior years of college while continuing to work for TCC as a writing center assistant. Deeply passionate about gender equality, literature, and racial justice, she is always amongst the first to speak up in class with consistently thoughtful and seemingly prepared responses when the professor asks a tough question most other TCU students would be too scared or even annoyed to answer. She’s the kind of person I aspire to be.

I first met her my freshman year through TCU’s creative writing club, Scribble Frogs, where she appeared sporadically at weekly meetings. We didn’t speak to each other very much at first--that would come with time, when we started taking upper-division classes together--but I couldn’t help but notice some of the ways that her mannerisms reflected my own. She would sit quietly through meetings for the most part, contributing her unique insights occasionally such as how to use a specific feature on Canva or random lore about Farenheit 451 or another book I tell myself I’ll read one day. After meetings, she would drift off from the group and quietly tend to her work on her laptop on a chair in the hallway. It was only after sitting next to her and asking about what she was working on—the layout for the newest edition of TCC’s literary magazine--that I found out that she was a transfer student, a junior, and not a freshman like me.

Moving away from home and into college is challenging for everyone who is lucky enough to experience it. As someone who struggles with social anxiety, that challenge felt twofold. But as I listened to Samantha’s story, I realized how much more of a challenge it is to transfer in the middle of it, to be dropped into a pool of juniors and seniors who you don’t know at all.

“I know that this college is very small in comparison to something like UT or UNT,” she explained to me as we sat in a quiet, secluded spot in Rees-Jones Hall at TCU. We felt so far away from the passing crowds of students who wandered between classes, talking amongst themselves. “But for me, it was still kind of disorienting, transferring in because there were so many things to do. So many people I didn't know. And I was also coming in as a junior, and by that time, people already have their cliques established and that kind of thing.”

When I asked about what inspired her to make such a drastic life change, knowing that it would pose so many social difficulties, she answered, “I really liked TCU’s mission statement. I liked that there was such a big commitment to global leadership…and I admired that AddRan was the first college we had. I knew that I wanted to go into liberal arts, and I thought that TCU would be a better established college for that.”

I can’t help but admire her for this response, this dedication to pursuing the education she wants from the best place she can get it, even at the cost of leaving established social connections at TCC behind. One could also argue that this is highly different from the normal TCU response; at least in my experience, seldom is having a strong liberal arts program listed as a top motivation for attending by its students, and certainly not its mission statement. The school will proudly brag that it’s ranked #1 by The Princeton Review for happiest students, and from personal experience, the vast majority of students chose to attend because they liked the school’s culture; to them, it seemed warm, inviting, and friendly.

For Samantha, however, coming in halfway through college seemed to get in the way of having what others might deem the “ideal” TCU experience. Her junior year, she was assigned to live on the fourth floor of Wright Hall, a floor intended specifically for transfer students.

“Unfortunately, my roommate wasn’t a transfer student,” she revealed. “It just so happened that she was on a floor with transfer students. And we didn’t really do anything together as a floor ever.”

Thus, her living situation provided little opportunity for peer connection. This is in stark contrast to my own experience living in Milton Daniel, the residence hall designed specifically for first-year Honors students. From pancake nights every Monday to events with the RAs, the building was designed specifically to build community and help residents get to know each other--and it mostly worked, because most Honors students seem to know each other well.

The transfer floor of Wright does not seem to have the same thought and care put into building community and hosting events. “There wasn’t really a cohesive identity that the fourth floor really had established or anything. They were all random people,” Samantha mused. “I think it also could have partially been that our RA was so busy.”

Instead of making friends through designated transfer student social events, Samantha describes most of her connections and the people she’s met at TCU as coming mostly from shared interests and classes. This makes sense, considering the wide variety of backgrounds that transfer students have; they all come from different schools and have different interests, so one can’t just assume that they will immediately become friends just because of their transfer status.

“I think the first week of school I met [one of my friends] at a transfer connection thing,” she told me. “It was an event to walk around the campus and that was the first week. So that was good. But really, I got to know her through my English classes that I had with her. So that was a better place.”

Additionally, she described the designated transfer student resources as lacking, too. Though she took a Transfer Success Skills class designed to help TCU students succeed, she felt that it didn’t do a thorough job of introducing her to TCU-specific resources, culture, and lexicon. Events like visits from the career and writing centers seemed more oriented towards first-year students experiencing college for the first time and not transfer students with a variety of backgrounds and some college experience already behind them.

“I know what a writing center is. Like, okay. I wish it was a little bit more focused on TCU-specific stuff instead of just how to be a student. Because I know how to be a student.” For her, little things like not being told what the “KFC” or “G-spot” were or that she needed to minor in a subject in order to graduate started to add up. “I don’t know how to be a student at TCU. That is the thing that I critique.”

Another crucial aspect of this apparent disconnect is Samantha’s status as a commuter student. Throughout our conversation, it became clear to me that Samantha’s relationship to her surroundings and physical space is a significant source of her feeling belonging. “When I went to TCC, I walked to class, which was a different experience. Like, I've really, really fond memories of, like, walking across the West End Bridge and dancing all the way to school and that kind of thing,” she recalled. “I think that that gave me connection to the ground that I was on, and I felt very at home when I was going to TCC.”

During her first year at TCU, though she didn’t feel socially connected to other students, she felt a degree of belonging just by living in dorms on campus. “That was a good experience and I liked it. I liked that I was here because it meant that I could spend less time traveling so that I could study more and read more, which is like a good thing as an English major.”

However, things changed the following year when she had to live off-campus and drive to class instead. “I spend, what, like 30 minutes driving here and 30 minutes driving back,” she explained. “There’s less freedom in it, in a way. I like that can go anywhere, and I like that I have that mobility for myself. But I also can’t go eat whenever I want. If I have to eat, I have to eat before I leave. So there’s that, and then a lot of events are inaccessible to me because I'm not on campus.”

I can relate to this; certainly, my freshman year, having my own dorm room, a space to retreat to that was meant for me where I could escape into my studies and reading, helped me feel a certain sense of belonging on campus—that there was always room for me, at the end of the day, whether or not other people understood or spoke to me. That feeling can completely disappear for commuter students. “TCC is strictly a commuter school. So I was used to it,” she explained. Still, though, with TCU’s culture being so different and so many students living together in dorms and on-campus apartments, having to commute could feel extra alienating when added to the rest of the problems transfer students experience; it contributes to that feeling of displacement, like they have no true home.

So, how can one find home in a place like this? In addition to having a physical connection to the space by living on campus, Samantha suggested that a huge source of belonging for her is being able to contribute to change and help improve the student experience. “The thing that I really admire about TCC and the time that I spent there was that because I was working there and because I was so involved was that I felt like I had the ability to create change on campus,” she told me.

She’d worked for a year as a Spanish tutor and was constantly advocating for the Trinity River campus, the only TCC campus without a language lab, to give their students more resources—and to a certain degree, she succeeded, though she didn’t realize this until later. “There is a guide full of ESL resources that I was very pleased to see. I think it was last week that I saw that actually. I was like, oh, okay. Like my voice does matter after I'd spent so long thinking that that did nothing.”

When I asked her about whether or not she felt she could make a meaningful difference at TCU, she was less sure. She finds change somewhat difficult to enact at TCU due in part to its structure—and again, the theme of not being fully explained the rules of the school and its unique language began to emerge. “I understand the structure of TCC,” she told me. “It's very much a pyramid thing. And here, I don't really understand the structure of who's a dean, who does what, what is the difference between dean and a director, and we've got a bunch of different provosts. I don't know if you have presidents or vice presidents or... so weird. It's really, really weird. And that's not a bad thing, but I think that if you're going to create change on campus, you kind of need to know who you're talking to.”

There is power in knowing how an institution works, in knowing how to navigate it. Think of, for instance, the intentional withholding of language from enslaved people by enslavers. Or the way that an immigrant might not find out about certain legal rights until they read about it online. Of course, these are dramatically different situations, but it’s not hard to see certain parallels with how withholding of information can make people feel out of place and that they don’t belong to a certain culture—whether intentional or not.

To return to the beginning question, it seems to me that it is only worth leaving one’s past behind in search of a brighter future if one is certain that they will have steady ground to stand on where they land. For Samantha, the transfer experience has been tumultuous, but moments of stability have come from feeling belonging in three ways: to a physical space, to likeminded people, and to having the ability to enact change.

Listening to her speak, I realized that what I fear about transferring schools is not failure, but displacement—the possibility of arriving somewhere without the language, relationships, or power to claim it as my own home. Like many people shaped by diaspora and migration, Samantha exists in an in-between space: no longer fully rooted in TCC, and not quite given the tools to fully belong at TCU. And yet she persists, finding meaning where she can and contributing where she is able. This is what I find so inspiring about her. If home is not guaranteed, then perhaps it is something we must assemble gradually with time—somewhere we must quietly insist we belong in.