Stop for a moment, look around the room, and pick a student at random — there is only about a 2.5% chance that they were not admitted through Swarthmore’s standard first-year admissions process.
Transfer students have existed in some capacity at Swarthmore for more than 150 years. For much of that time, however, the college maintained a very small transfer population. In 2006, Dean of Admissions Jim Bock ’90 said transfers have historically been admitted largely based simply on available beds — a constraint that has persisted even in recent years.
In 2024, despite receiving 371 transfer applications, Swarthmore admitted zero transfer students due to space concerns.
In the past two years, however, Swarthmore’s commitment to enrolling and supporting transfer students has expanded — most recently through the 2024 Swarthmore Forward strategic plan. Transfer students now make up only roughly 45 of Swarthmore’s 1,695 students. In 2025, the college enrolled nineteen new transfer students, and in 2026, that number grew to 24 — twelve of whom attended community college.
I am among those twelve.
After dropping out of high school at age fourteen in 2020, I was lost. I spent the next four years working jobs, learning on my own, and, frankly, rotting at home — unsure of where I was going, if anywhere.
Growing up, I had been resigned to attending the deeply religious schools chosen for me by my parents, where any form of secular education was extremely limited. I broke from that path in 2020 — but I still had little sense of what direction my life would take.
That changed in 2024. At eighteen, I earned my GED and enrolled at Ocean County College — a community college in New Jersey. For the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to choose an educational path of my own.
I chose community college partially because it was convenient, but mostly because I doubted myself. Attending became a test for me — a way to see whether my past really was a ceiling or something I could overcome. What I found surprised me: community college changed my life. There, for the first time, I found the tools, allies, and curriculum that allowed me to develop into the academic I am today.
Eventually, however, my time at community college began to draw to a close as I prepared to graduate with an Associate’s degree in the class of 2026. When I first enrolled, I fully expected to follow the uncomplicated New Jersey community college path — transferring to a state school like Rutgers or Montclair State University. However, after gaining confidence in myself and a clearer sense of my ambitions, and with the encouragement of incredible mentors, I decided to expand my horizons and by adding several highly selective schools to my transfer list.
Truthfully, the transfer application process was utterly miserable. Expectations were high, writing applications was arduous, and many institutions were incredibly specific about the kind of transfer students they were seeking.
After fourteen stressful applications and decisions, I ultimately chose to enroll at Swarthmore as a member of the class of 2028 and a McCabe Scholar.
In my short time here, I have already begun to find community — not just among my fellow transfer students, but in classrooms, dorms, and student organizations across campus.
That sense of community also inspired six of us to refound the Transfer Student Organization. Together, we hope to provide peer support, share resources, advocate for transfer students, and create space for non-transfer students to better understand the transfer experience.
Every transfer arrives here with a different academic history, reason for transferring, and set of expectations about what starting over at a new college might look like. To gain a broader understanding of these differing perspectives, I spoke with two members of the Transfer Student Organization’s executive board — London Olds ’28 and Maria Almarza ’28 — in a joint interview.
For London — a fellow New Jersey community college transfer who graduated from Camden County College with an A.A. in Liberal Arts — community college began while she was still in high school. As a first-generation college student, she had little guidance on what to expect and quickly found that the social college experience she imagined did not quite exist at her community college.
When I jokingly asked if her experience was anything like the sitcom “Community,” she conceded that she did, in fact, take two semesters of Spanish — but, unfortunately, there was no multicultural study group getting up to shenanigans.
Maria — a McCabe Scholar who graduated from the Honors College at Miami Dade College — had an entirely different community college experience from London. She began in classical vocal music before finding new interests in English literature, public policy, and constitutional law — alongside professors who encouraged her to expand her ambitions.
Transfer preparation was also built directly into her program. Application work was incorporated into coursework, and fees were covered by the Honors College — this was an experience that neither London nor I had.
Before arriving on campus, transfer outreach was extremely sparse. Over the summer, we received just one email from Yulia Korovikov, associate dean of admissions and director of recruitment — who graciously reached out with words of congratulations and an offer of support. We also had a Zoom meeting with Associate Dean of Academic Success Liz Derrickson, who serves as dean to all transfer students and has become someone we genuinely value and appreciate.
We fought incredibly hard to get here — through applications, uncertainty, and years spent proving we belonged in spaces like Swarthmore. We just wanted to feel some of the fruits of that labor, so it was a little disappointing that our accepted-student packages were only given to us once we were on campus, and that there is no transfer-specific swag to help us literally wear our transfer pride on our sleeves.
Something we all appreciated was arriving early for a single extra day of transfer-only programming before joining the first-year students for the remainder of orientation. We all wished, though, that the transfer-specific programming had lasted longer and continued throughout the week.
It was clear that the transfer-only day helped the cohort form early connections — something especially valuable for students anxious about arriving on campus without an established group of friends.
Once we joined the broader new-student orientation, much of the programming repeated information we had already learned through years of college — we were adjusting to Swarthmore, not to college for the first time. In an already packed week, we wished more of that time had gone toward the transfer-specific academic transition itself — like working out transfer credits, meeting advisors, and planning for registration.
That left much of the actual transition to happen on the fly. Some of us only met with our advisor the day before or the day of registration, while others arrived uncertain about their academic paths — even after spending much of the summer conducting our own searches for answers. A little more preparation before we arrived could have made those first few weeks — and much of the semester so far — feel far less like playing catch-up, with the clock on our time at Swarthmore already ticking in the background.
For many of us, that clock is especially unforgiving as a good amount of transfers in our cohort arrived as juniors — with only two years remaining — while some are sophomores, who experience the time crunch differently because they have slightly more time at Swarthmore.
We all struggled with registering for upper-level courses after our upperclass peers had already completed registration — leaving us with significantly fewer options and having to beg professors to make room in full classes. Registering alongside incoming freshmen was frustrating, but what really stung was choosing from a much narrower course catalogue and having to plead for a seat. Transfers need “their own specific infrastructure,” as London put it.
At the same time, though, we’ve all felt warmly towards the professors and advisors we have found at Swarthmore. They have been accessible, encouraging, and genuinely invested in helping us find our footing here.
Our adjustment also lacks one protection afforded to incoming first-years: Swarthmore’s automatic first-semester Credit/No Credit grading period. A similar policy for transfers admittedly would not make sense — especially when junior transfers have only four semesters to establish a Swarthmore GPA. Still, transfers are susceptible to transfer shock — the academic disruption and GPA drops that can come with adjusting to a new institution — especially one as rigorous as Swarthmore.
Transfer-specific support can make a major difference in creating a smooth adjustment. A “transfer buddy” peer-mentorship program had been in development but never launched — for reasons I could not verify through the Student Government Organization (SGO), which originally proposed the program.
Even our Student Academic Mentor (SAM) is not a transfer student — not a reflection on our wonderful SAM, but perhaps a missed opportunity to connect incoming transfers with someone who has actually navigated the transfer experience themselves.
One of the most unfortunate — and honestly hurtful — restrictions junior transfers face is being prevented from studying abroad. Because of Swarthmore’s four-semester residency requirement, those of us arriving as juniors cannot study abroad, putting a staple of the college experience out of reach for us.
We recognize that some of these frustrations do not have easy solutions. Swarthmore cannot give junior transfers back the years we spent elsewhere, nor can every opportunity fit neatly into our shortened timeline. Still, knowing that does not make those losses feel any less real.
All of this has raised a question among us — are two years enough to become a “Swattie?”
For Maria, the answer is already yes. She feels rooted in her classes, organizations, friendships, and faculty relationships — although she acknowledged that much of her integration came from aggressively seeking those connections herself. Two years, she believes, can be enough to belong, even if they are not enough to experience everything Swarthmore has to offer.
London is less certain. She feels welcomed here and connected to her professors and classmates, but wonders whether four semesters are enough for Swarthmore to become deeply ingrained in her identity — particularly when another two years of college already came before it.
As for me, it is hard to know whether two years will ever be enough to make me feel like a Swattie. I worked incredibly hard to get here, and I want nothing more than to feel like I’ve finally found a home — but sometimes I still feel less like someone settling into a college and more like a traveler passing through, trying to take in as much as possible before the next departure.
Maybe, with time, being a Swattie will become part of my identity. Or maybe I will leave knowing I belonged to this community for a little while — even if I never quite stop feeling like a sojourner.
