College classes are the perfect example of things that can be accurately judged from a first impression, no matter how fleeting. Let’s take a look at some of the most common experiences you might have on your first day and what they might mean about the class ahead.

What happens: Your prof shows up 10 minutes late, frazzled and smelling heavily of espresso.
What it means: Feel free to come to class in your PJs and contribute to class discussion with garbled comments that aren’t fully formed, since your prof will neither care nor be able to tell the difference.

What happens: A PowerPoint presentation is already up on the screen when you enter, and the prof has a writing implement in his or her breast pocket.
What it means: Watch out, sister! This prof isn’t going to take any shenanigans. S/he is likely to be a hard grader, so start assembling your study group pronto with the cute dudes who sit near you.

What happens: The prof hands out the syllabus, reads it word for word, asks if everyone has the textbook, and dismisses you early.
What it means: Don’t be fooled by the early dismissal. This is a by-the-book prof who isn’t too keen on original ideas and probably doesn’t want to hear yours. Learn to read and regurgitate what’s in the textbook, and fast.

What happens: You all meet at the coffee shop and the prof buys everyone drinks and pastries.
What it means: Count your blessings. Your prof is either really nice or really insecure—better hope it’s the former.

What happens: You do an icebreaker activity with the other students in your class.
What it means: Your prof used to be a corporate motivational speaker. Polish off your phrases of cynicism, because you’ll probably need them for the kind of crap you’re going to hear in this class.

Ready for the big time? Start studying your profs’ mannerisms, fashion sense (or lack thereof), and office decor (yes, that does require you to attend office hours). It might be a pain, but it’s not a waste of time. When you supplement your in-class comments with similar body language or slip in that “Far Side” reference that reflects a cartoon your prof has outside his office door, you can start welcoming those A+’s with open arms!

Can you believe it’s 2010? Where did the year go? Where did the decade go? Hell, where did my sequin jacket go? And why did I think that chasing a Jager Bomb with a bottle of Andre was a good idea? Oh lord.

Right now it’s probably hard to think about anything but a greasy breakfast sandwich, a gallon of water and how you’re going to get that rando out of your bed, but it’s the first day of the new year and you know what that means: it’s massive hangover resolution time.

This week I asked the CollegeCandy writers to share their resolutions for the new year. Most of the girls are on their own with sticking to their list, but every month we’re going to check in with a few of them on their quest for self improvement. Will they stick to their resolutions and become the best they can be? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I’ve already ruined my personal resolution of treating my body well (I’ve got a stack of pancakes and a giant latte sitting next to me at the moment), so I just hope they fare better than me.

Arielle – Quinnipiac University: Stop going on Facebook and the internet, and read some books instead!

Nina – Michigan State University: I am going to stop watching brain-suckers like Keeping Up With the Kardashians and watch more health and knowledge related shows. Maybe.

Brithny – Duke:  To fit into my skinny jeans without having to do the after-laundry lunges. You know the ones I’m talking about.

Meg – University of Delaware: cut down my severe caffiene addiction

Anna R – Northeastern University: To finish paying off my credit card debt and save at least $1000 next semester… Somehow I’m hoping I will achieve this while doing an unpaid internship in NYC.

Kim – Stanford: To get a job in NYC and move there after graduation!

Jessica – Hofstra: Stop procrastinating, and start saving money by finding boys to buy my drinks at the bar!

Lauren – University of Michigan: To figure out the difference between need (healthy food) and want (Marc Jacobs handbags and vodka). Oh, and to stop convincing myself that my jeans from senior year of high school still fit. If I can’t breathe, they do not fit. It’s that simple.

Charlsie – Hollins University: To stop reading Perez Hilton. He spreads negativity around and I’m sick of participating in it.

Jackelyn – San Francisco State University: To go for what I want. There’s no better time than today to get things done!

Sarabeth – University of Texas: To legitimately work out this year, no more of this “walking to class counts” crap.

Noa – CU Boulder: To learn how to make Thai food. I swear I spend half of my money on Pad See Ew.

Zahra – Northwestern University: To choose one or two resolutions and stick to them! I always end up with, like, ten. I’m still not sure what the actual resolutions will be but, hey, it’s a start!

Caitlin – University of Alabama: To stop letting people take me for granted! I deserve some thanks for all of the things I do dammit.

Emmy- Loyola University Chicago: To focus on academics and own all my classes next semester.

Erica – Kent State University: To be a better friend. And to find shoes like this.

Ricki – University of Michigan: I will stop buying so much overpriced coffee and learn to make it myself. I will also not count coffee on my parents credit card as “me not paying” because I am actually just fooling myself.

What do you want to do better this year?

The thought of transferring crosses your mind. And then the thoughts of all you’d have to do -  paperwork, credit juggling, and the process of making new friends all over again – flood your brain. My expert advice (I’m a self-proclaimed expert, of course)  is to give your school a fighting chance before you go through the grueling process of transferring. But if you’re really unhappy, a change can be well worth it.

There are many different options when it comes to your education, some of which you might never knew existed. Here are a few different routes you can take on your path to academic success and happiness:

• Four-Year College
It might be a public university or it might be a private school, but places are handing out bachelor’s degrees like candy these days (well, if you do the work, anyway). This is probably the type of school most of you are in and the type to which most of you would consider transferring. There are zillions of them, so do your research and really know what you want—don’t just transfer because your boyfriend goes there.

• Career College
If you know exactly what you want to do and you’re on the fast track to doing it, consider a career college. Some of them can be just as pricey as liberal-arts colleges, but they may not keep you there for the full four years, and when you’re done, you’re basically set to get a job or apprenticeship in your field. A quick way to check out your options is to visit a site like CollegeSurfing.com, which lets you search for schools by career interest.

• Technical School
A little bit like a career college, a technical school preps you for employment in a specific line of work. Most of the programs are only two years long, so you’ll be able to graduate before all your friends and start raking in the dough while they’re still paying off loans. Common technical-school programs include management, beauty, culinary arts, and trades like welding. The U.S. Department of Education gives you a few tips to keep in mind when trying to choose a technical school, such as making sure the institution is accredited.

• Vocational School/Trade School
Vocational school is closely connected with apprenticeship programs and is likely to give you a lot of on-the-job training. It also prepares you for a specific line of work, but the difference is that most vocational-school programs are non-academic and primarily require you to work with your hands. You can go to vocational school to learn how to be a mechanic or a blacksmith, for example, although the term has branched out considerably to now encompass careers in cosmetics and other fields as well. Explore what’s available from the vocational-school world at this directory.

Obviously, there are other options – dropping out and open a cupcake bakery, for example – but if you want to earn that degree or certificate, you’ll likely be hitting up one of the above. Before you go, though, get to the root of why you’re transferring, and make sure it’s the right decision for you. You want to make sure to make an informed decision this time so you don’t have to do the Transfer Shuffle again!

Just remember that transferring should be primarily motivated by an academic choice. If you’re going through a tough time with friends or boys or making your mark on a campus, trying on a new school for size isn’t likely to solve all your problems (that’s what chocolate is for).

We at CC want you to be happy, and part of that includes finding the school that fits your needs best, so if you’re not there, go forth and explore!

"WHY DIDN'T I SAVE THAT?!"

Did you know that college was all about academics?

Yeah, we didn’t get that memo either. We spent more time researching easy professors, building a schedule that didn’t require waking up before noon/at all on Fridays, and playing Kings, than actually studying. And now that we’re out of school and forced to use what we “learned” in college to survive, we’re kinda regretting opting for that easy American Culture class over a much more useful economics section.

Other big regrets: getting drunk before a giant presentation on St. Patrick’s Day, skipping discussion sections to snuggle with the BF, and taking that 1-credit “blow off” that actually had two 10-page papers and a final exam. Who knew one stupid credit could wreak such havoc on your GPA?

It’s obvious that most of us have made some poor decisions in college (and I’m not talking about the time I double fisted a fifth of Captain’s and a 2-liter of Diet Coke); it’s hard to think of academics, learning and our futures when there are football games to attend and beds to sleep in. This week I asked the CollegeCandy writers to share their biggest academic regrets. Maybe you can learn from them. Maybe you can relate to them. And I know you definitely have some of your own to share.

Kari – Florida State: I regret not going to attendance-mandatory classes. For some reason I never believe that my teachers will take off those “half letter grades per absence”…and it sucks to watch an A go to a C because I hit the snooze button a few too many times.

Elizabeth – UC Berkeley: Deciding to take my TREES class for a letter grade instead of P/NP because I thought it would be an easy A.  Def ruined my GPA that semester…

Caitlin – University of Alabama: Slacking off in my last few weeks of my math class and getting an 89.4. They didn’t round up.

Charlsie – Hollins University: I wish I stuck with French and studied abroad in Paris my junior year, instead of abandoning foreign language completely.

Lauren – University of Michigan: Not majoring in History. I hated every single English class I took.

Ricki – University of Michigan: Drinking too much at my date’s semi formal and fainting in the middle of my Econ 101 presentation the next morning.

Thu – USC: I discovered online TV shows. Game over for my GPA.

Nina – Michigan State University: Going out the night before my final last year. It was absolute hell sitting through it… even though I did ace it.

Brithny – Duke: During freshman year, I had no idea how many famous researchers and nationally recognized professors there were here! Definitely signing up for those classes this time around.

Noa – CU Boulder: Sleeping with my T.A. And then ending things with him while I was still in the class. Awkward city.

Kelly – Simmons College: My biggest academic regret is that I put everything off until the last minute and then have to bed my boyfriend for Adderall to get it done.

Brittany – University of Richmond: Turning in my Calculus final exam completely blank. Apparently, professors aren’t above failing students and consequently booting them out of the Business School.

Elizabeth-University of Missouri: Going out the night before a huge Anthropology test. A pseudo frat house is not the environment most conducive to studying.

Sarabeth – University of Texas: My biggest regret is saying no to a Blink 182 (favorite band EVER) ticket last week because I had a paper due…and  then the paper got moved.

Zahra – Northwestern University:  I regret not taking a 9 am class this quarter. I’ve done it before and it makes me so much more productive than when I know I can sleep in until noon.

[It's pretty obvious that the average CollegeCandy reader has some very strong opinions. Opinions that she likes to share with everyone on the site.

Alright, since we spent last week debating what it means to cheat in a relationship, it only seems right to figure out what the other kind of cheating means – the kind that involves teachers. Everybody thinking dirty things about teachers, get your mind out of the gutter (for now). Seriously though, we’ve all read the school policies about cheating and plagarism, but at the same time, most of us have done something that we wouldn’t really want the school to know about. How guilty should we really feel? It’s time to duke it out!

There are some things we can pretty much all agree are cheating – copying a paper word for word (or Wikipedia *cough cough*), sneaking a peek at someone else’s test answers. But what if you take someone else’s info and reword it? Or if you take the ideas from another work and write it out your own way. Afterall, most scholars read other papers on their topics and get ideas from them that they craft into thier own work and that’s not considered cheating. True, scholars add things to the information they borrow, but if you do the same thing, then is it ok? And what if you don’t borrow much? What if it’s just one sentence? Or just a quote that you forgot to mark? According to most school regulations that could qualify as cheating – and get you kicked out.

You also get into an inky area when it comes to “study groups”. On the one hand, it can be helpful and legit to get a bunch of people together to work on something tough, but if you’re coming up with the same answers and ideas, then it’s not very different than mental plagiarism. And with math and science classes, the problem only gets more complex because one person almost always comes up with the answer first, leaving everyone else to basically copy it down.

Oh and let’s not forget the other side of this equation – what if aren’t the person using someone else’s work, but someone selling work to be used by others? All of those term paper sites and test answer keys floating around come from somewhere. Someone out there is selling the work; does that count as cheating?

Ok, what do you think? How seriously would you take the word “cheating” and how far would you push it? Put it to a vote in the comments!

I remember going to college expecting to make some of the best friends of my life. It had always seemed that way — you have nice high school friends, but gradually they fade out of the picture and your college friends dominate your life. Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to be?

As I arrived at school and plunged into the rigorous academic environment that was promised in the Princeton brochure, the social scene surprised me in some way. There were the usual kinds of people I expected — the jocks, the preps, the econ majors — but not the friendships I was looking forward to.

I had dining hall buddies (people to eat and swap jokes with), and homework buddies (people to frantically share answers on problem sets with), but there was no gang of girls sharing secrets and supporting each other the way there was in high school. I compared notes with other friends and they agreed; for one reason or another, no one had as close friendships in college as they did in high school.

Why?

It seems that high school is an altogether more social experience than college. The higher you rise in education, in fact, the more solitary and independent you’re expected to be, so if you get to grad school you’re basically holed up in your library cube  all day with little contact with the outside world.

People in college are independent and driven. They have career goals and they always have things to do and places to be, most of which don’t involve bonding. Even those so-called bonding sessions you think you are having seem like goals on the way to becoming the perfect, accomplished college student. That’s how the friendships seem to evolve as well: we need people to eat with, so we form dining-hall groups. We need people to help us with our work, so we form study groups. We need to bond with our sports team, so we hang out with other team members.

Friends just for the sake of friends are relatively rare.

College, in some ways, can be a lonely life. But that doesn’t mean connecting to people is impossible; you just need to know where to look.

Instead of just being drawn to the people on your hall out of geographic convenience, you’ll have to do a little sleuthing to find people who share your interests. Join a club related to what you feel passionate about. Chances are there’s a club on your campus that suits your interests, from literary magazines to ethnic identity groups to dance or film enthusiast organizations. If you’ve got problem-set buddies, that’s great, but maybe not everyone is taking the class because they love the subject. Seek out people in the class who really like what you do and talk about the homework together. Don’t just follow the crowd so you’ll have someone to party with on weekends — do a little extra work to find people you feel compatible with, and have lunch with them once or twice a week. That way, you can connect with people even if you don’t live close to them.

One thing you don’t want in college is to be hanging out with people who don’t care whether you fail or succeed, who only want to be with you as a step towards some other goal. Seek out people who will applaud your triumphs and sympathize with your hardships, and your social life on campus will be a vastly more rewarding one.

I made a mistake with where I chose to attend college. I take full accountability in admitting that I should not be where I am today, but here I am in my pink palace of a dorm room, hoping that some cosmic force stronger than my own folly has kept me here. Although my series usually focuses on the negative experiences at my university, in hopes to help others from making the same mistake as me (which actually doesn’t mean anyone should change their mind about coming to Hollins, it means anything that has happened to me here can happen at any college across the globe), I have decided in lieu of Valentine’s Day, I would share what I love about my college experience in the last two and a half years.

Academics: This is what college is all about, and in my opinion, it is learning what you want to learn (which is something I have experienced here more than not). When looking at other colleges across the nation to transfer to, I couldn’t find courses that enthralled me the way the course catalogue on my shelf does. Just like any college, I have taken a few dud classes (some have been general requirements, but that is expected), but for the most part, I have nothing to say besides exceptional reviews of all my classes. And what more can I ask for since I am here to get my degree? Anyone who is looking to transfer from their college seriously needs to consider the transition of academic life from school to school, because, at the end of the day, you are here (and you are paying mucho bucks!) to discover what is out there in the word of academia.

Friendship: During one of the first days of orientation I met my best friends. These girls are my family at a school that lacks the sisterhood it sells in glossy view books. Friendship is a huge aspect of college life, because I don’t think anyone could go through 4 years alone, especially at such a small college like Hollins. They are my partners in crime, my amusement on Friday nights, my choir when we are the only juniors singing in celebration to our senior class, but, most of all, they are my sisters. No one should ever stay strictly for the friends they have made, but in judging the friendships you have, it absolutely should be a factor. While I know I could make friends anywhere else, I could not call anyone else a sister (who I am not related to) the way I can with them.

Traditions: Hollins has outstanding traditions. What other college in the nation hikes up a mountain after the first frost of fall in October after eating Krispy Kreme donuts at 6am for Tinker Day? I don’t know of any other school, even those rich in tradition, that have the same spirit and zealous positivity behind them. I love to celebrate – anything and everything, whenever a celebration is called for – so being able to celebrate at Hollins really appealed to me. Although a lot of the traditions have been ruined for me (you will hear about that in a later article), I respect and honor all traditions through and through because of what they mean to the history of this school. Leaving, I would have had to learn new traditions and I wouldn’t have been there from the start to participate – and participation has helped me make them my own.

Opportunities: Every college has a lot to offer its students, some more than others. I think if you are willing to call yourself persistent and work hard to get what you want, anything you want can come your way. Through opportunities at Hollins, I was able to be the chair of the activity board’s General Speakers Bureau – an utterly life changing, invaluable experience. It allowed me to not only learn about event planning, but I was able to host some amazing modern day influences (especially transgendered author and playwright who moved the audience to tears, Kate Bornstein). While that is only one example of an opportunity I worked hard for and succeeded at, I have had many more. Despite all the hardships I have had on this campus, I have been able to make this campus my own.

And, of course, there are little things about this campus I love like the custodian, Vince, who knows my name, smiles, and always says hi – even though I have never personally met him. I love the History Department Party at the end of each semester that allows my friends and me to go crazy while dancing to old school rock. I love my peers who work so hard to do what means something to them, always changing and making a difference on campus and off. I love my professors that know me for who I am and have supported me through whatever I have needed. I love the way the trees bend, the loop winds along the rolling hills, and the grass grows so green. I love the way I imagine this place in the 60s, the 30s, and even the late 1800s. I really do love it, despite everything.

However, people ask me why I haven’t left, or why I am still here after two years of nonstop insanity and all I really have to say is that while I openly admit staying here is a mistake, being here – at this point in time – is the right thing for me. People have a love/hate relationship with everything from the red nail polish on their finger nails to their parents, and the relationship I have with Hollins is exactly that. The things that I love are something I will carry with me forever, while the things I hate are just obstacles in my everyday life, which have helped me become stronger as a student, a woman, and as an advocate for others and myself.

Now tell me, what makes you stay where you are. What makes you smile on your campus? Even if you hate your dorm room, your roommate, your classes, and the cold this winter – what on your campus makes you get out of bed every day? Is it your friends or the cafeteria food? Or is it the Professor who blesses you as class is letting out, or the spiral staircase in the main student building?

Tell me what you love about your college, no matter what your feelings about it are.

In 2008′s least shocking expose, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution dredged the sweat-stained pit of college academics and came up with, essentially, a national “dumb jock” joke.

Hating on athletes is pretty standard practice for the squishy intellectual set, probably because we’ve got a few bones to pick about getting stuffed in lockers and picked last for dodgeball. (As an aside, has anyone actually been stuffed into a locker in the past thirty years? The jocks these days just steal our iPods.)

But, whether we hear it from major newspapers or the bottom of locker no. 104, the news is the same: at the corner of college athletics and college admissions, something is gravely ill.

At the University of Georgia, the average football SAT was 949, which is 239 points behind the average for an undergraduate student at Georgia — and 79 points behind Tech’s football average. The Bulldogs’ average high school GPA was 2.77, or 45th out of 53 teams for which football GPAs were available. Their SAT average ranked them 22nd.

Nationwide, coaches who would never offer a scholarship to a player who was 6 inches shorter or half a second slower than other prospects routinely recruit players whose standardized test scores suggest they’re at a competitive disadvantage in the classroom.

For every school that had football and men’s basketball SAT data available, team members averaged hundreds of points lower than the general student body. And the best average football SAT score in the nation – 1058 at Georgia Tech – would barely be acceptable in your average liberal arts school candidate.

So what’s the problem here? Sure, UConn’s basketball department loved to rep 3.8-toting hoops star Emeka Okafor, but it’s silly to expect the average college athelete to devote the same level of energy to their schoolwork as a more mundane student, right? High-profile athletics takes passion, dedication and time, and if college teams want to compete, they have to make sacrifices.

But this begs the question: why do colleges want to compete so badly? Obvious answer – big athletics equals big money (UConn knows about that, too). Money can translate into high-profile academic gains, and so the admittance of lower-scoring students might just be a pill colleges have to swallow.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t really help the diligent students who get shoved out of their first-pick school because another, academically inferior candidate happened to have a good passing arm. And arguing that minority athletes tend to graduate more often than non-minority athletes, as Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt insists, doesn’t hold any water – honestly, what message does that send to minority students? You can succeed in the biased, loaded world of mainstream academia, but only if you Be Like Mike?

And what do those sacrifices mean for the college world as a whole? Ultimately, I don’t think lowering academic standards to boost athletic ones is a fair trade for the American educational system. The former president of the University of Florida complains that “We go out on the field and get beaten by people we couldn’t admit.” Well, as Americans, we’re gonna go out into the world and get beaten by the people we wouldn’t admit – bright, creative, well-educated individuals who would have found their college spots taken by athletes, and entire departments of geniuses who got their funding cut because they couldn’t sell Gatorade.

Athletics can’t be responsible for our national brain drain alone, but they’re sure not helping.

I dunno. Am I pulling a Merlin, complaining pointlessly about “games-mania”? Is this just the dodgeball welts talking? I’m not hating on athletics, and I’m sure that the average college philosophy (or my very own English, even) department isn’t very useful on the world stage, either. But with numbers like these coming out – though I know that SATs can be way off the mark – is it time for a cultural re-focusing? Help me out, here.

You’re off to college.

There are so many things to think (and stress) about; will I like my new roommate(s)? Will I get the classes I want? Will I make new friends? Should I join any campus clubs?

I can’t answer all of those questions, but I can tell you from personal experience that when it comes to joining clubs, go for it! I can guarantee it’ll enrich your overall college experience – helping you make new friends, giving you something to look forward to on a regular basis, offering an outlet for your passion and surprisingly enough, it can oftentimes lead to you doing even better at your academics.

Why am I so adamant about the positives of joining clubs? I guess to understand that, I have to tell my personal story.

When I graduated high school many moons ago, I went straight to the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). While it’s a fantastic school with a reputation for excellent academics, I was at a tumultuous time of my life and was not prepared for the strains of college. I made some great friends my first year in the dorms and had fun, but I was always hesitant to really participate in extracurricular activities. After a couple of very rough years, I decided to take some time off (AKA drop out) and take some time to “find myself” (AKA work in Corporate America and party a lot).

Fast forward a few years to my decision to go back to school at Columbia University. This time around, I knew I wanted to make the most of my undergraduate experience. I was going to have as much fun as I could and to partake in as many activities as I could, because, hey, once you leave college, those chances of being involved in clubs and activities that you truly love are few and far between.

In my time at Columbia I served on the Spring Formal committee, was in a theatre group, was appointed to numerous committees by my dean and our student body president, was an elections commissioner, an orientation leader, and I served as the Social Chair of my program for one year. Needless to say, I was insanely busy and at times a bit overwhelmed, but when all was said and done, the experience was phenomenal and so different from my first college experience.

I made incredible friends, got great relationships with faculty members, accumulated countless memories and gained interpersonal and networking skills that are proving to be helpful in the “grown-up world”. And despite my chaotic schedule and my occasional meltdown, in the year that I was social chair and serving on so many committees, I had the best GPA of my entire time at Columbia. It was as if the added pressure and lack of free time made me better at time management and didn’t allow for my usual routine of procrastinating until the night before an exam or paper was due. It was uplifting, fulfilling and I believe with everything in me that it made my experience better than I could have ever imagined.

As you’re beginning this journey, think about things you’re passionate about and what you would like to participate in. Into bike riding, kayaking, stopping world hunger, underwater basket weaving? There is a club for you. In fact, the fun of college clubs is that you can basically find one for everything, and if for some reason you can’t, you always have the option to create your own. Just do it. You will make great friends, find your place on campus and really enhance the limited time you have there.

I can promise you won’t regret it.

Then, THE WAIT. And running to the mail box every day. Staring at your application status page – pressing F5 over and over (refresh, refresh, refresh!). Until, one day that magical word appears: admitted.

Fast forward to September.

The move-in is over (your mom only broke down once, thank goodness). The awkward, “Hi, I’m going to be living in close quarters!” moment is over with your roomie(s) and classes have begun.

And an unsettling feeling set in. This place isn’t what you thought it would be. You try to love it – really you do – but it isn’t the right fit and you can’t seem to get into a groove. You know you could transfer but *argh!* you thought you were set! That the application insanity was done for good! What do you do?

This was my story.

I, an LA girl, decided I wanted to experience life outside of tinsel town and get down to my German/ Norwegian roots. Yes. I moved to Wisconsin!

UW-Madison was far too expensive, so I applied to a small private college nearby. It seemed perfect— a cute little campus, single dorms available to freshmen girls (walk-in closets!) and they were offering me a 50% scholarship on academic merits. Plus they had a consortium with UW-Madison. I was totally psyched—the best of both worlds!

Then it was September and suddenly my perfect little plan began to have some SERIOUS flaws:

1. Everyone was from a small town in WI, which was cool, but as a Californian I was a minor celebrity, which got stale super fast. I just couldn’t fit in.

2. I couldn’t have a car on campus and a trip via bus to the nearest shopping area took nearly an hour in transit time—and that’s once I made the bus. It came every 30 min or so. As it got chilly this became a major issue.

3. Similarly, the bad bus situation made taking courses at UW-Madison totally ridiculous. (Bye-bye consortium)

4. There was one prof for my major. ONE. Silly me, I assumed that if you were going to offer a major you’d actually have profs on hand. One prof doesn’t a major make (especially because he was HORRIBLE!!!).

The list goes on and on and on.

Suffice it to say that by the end of September I had decided to move on. I think that if it had only been the social thing I might have stuck it out. But the academic flaws tipped the scale. (Did I mention my French professor mainly spoke in English and would accuse me of “throwing a flying saucer into her lecture” if I dared ask a question?)

I knew that I wanted to go to a good grad school and I began to realize that staying at this school would be the best way to drastically decrease my chances.

I’m not going to lie—the transfer process was incredibly stressful. Getting letters of rec sucks when you’ve only been at the school for a few months. “Hi professor, ummm your school sucks so I’m trying to transfer to a better one.” Or even better: “Hi former high school teacher, I made a horrible choice in colleges and I need you to write ANOTHER letter of rec for me.” Even more, I knew that to transfer into a competitive program from my dinky college I’d need great grades.

Oh, and remember THE WAIT? Well it’s longer for transfer students—I didn’t hear definitively from my top choice until the middle of May.

But it was SO worth it. I transferred to GW in Washington D.C. and I looooove it. I actually had to study at GW (Ok, yes I’m a total nerd but this made me really happy) and my fellow students were similarly motivated. And, best of all there were lots and lots of profs for my department!

Transferring is not for the weak of heart. But if you know you can do better, whether it be academically, athletically, socially, etc. then you owe it to yourself to give it a shot.

Incidentally, I’m writing this during my insane apartment hunting in NYC—because I’m going to grad school at NYU. There’s a very slim chance I would be here had I not taken the plunge.