Jennifer Vu is in a daze. In the past three weeks the Loyola University New Orleans student has lost her school, the rent on her house, contact with most of her friends and some family and all of her possessions. She has only the three days’ worth of clothes she packed when she evacuated New Orleans on Aug. 27 for a weekend at her new family home in Monroe, La.

On that same day, Vu’s classmate and friend Kelly McCarty was given 10 minutes to evacuate her rented home in New Orleans. The morning after she arrived back to college from her family’s house in Atlanta, a roommate woke her to tell her that they had to leave. He took her to her boyfriend’s family in Lake Charles, La., where she stayed in the family’s three-bedroom, two-bathroom house for five days with 20 other people

Jason Boice was already a week into his first year at Loyola when he evacuated. He had planned to stay at the Hilton in the French Quarter with a friend’s father, but the dad paid a cab driver $1,000 to drive them to Orlando, Fla. From there, he got them plane tickets back home to the Washington, D.C., area.

“If I hadn’t gotten out, I would have been at the Superdome too,” Boice said.

Now, the three are still picking up the pieces of their old lives – shattered by the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina – as students with a new campus and a new home at Georgetown.

The levees broke in New Orleans on Aug. 29. Seven days later, Vu, McCarty and Boice were already touring Georgetown’s campus. The two juniors wanted to be able to find their classes the following day – classes that they would be starting three days late.

The academic transition has been an adjustment for the transfers.

“The teachers have been great, but it’s a more intense academic atmosphere than Loyola,” sophomore Will Jarrott said. “There’s more work to be done, and more expected of students.”

“I still feel like a freshman walking around on campus,” McCarty said. “It should be exciting, but we had completely different plans for our lives. I was so excited for classes this semester.”

Georgetown has enrolled 83 students displaced from Tulane and Loyola universities, 54 of them undergraduates on the main campus, as part of an emergency cross-registration program implemented after the scope of the hurricane’s devastation became clear. The main campus agreed to admit Loyola students, while the Law Center accepted students from both Loyola and Tulane.

One of the hardest parts of the transition to Georgetown, students said, has been the speed of the change. Many displaced students could not have imagined a month ago that they would be living and studying in Washington, D.C., preparing for midterms at a campus over 1,000 miles from New Orleans.

Focusing on academics in a new and unexpected environment has been particularly hard on Vu, whose family lived in New Orleans until just before Katrina hit.

“It’s really hard to catch up in class when everyday [the hurricane] is on my mind,” she said. “There are TVs and newspapers everywhere – the library, Leavey, everywhere. That’s my hometown, that’s where I grew up, it’s all I know.”

Getting in touch with friends and family has been an added difficulty for the Loyola students. Landlines are still down in New Orleans and other areas of Louisiana and Texas. Cell phones with Louisiana area codes are not always in service.

“Possessions can be replaced, but my friends are all over the country,” McCarty said. “I still have people that I can’t get in touch with. And with the commute and catching up in school, I barely have time to talk to my parents and my boyfriend.”

Because Georgetown’s housing is near capacity, the university was able to offer fewer than 10 emergency transfer students housing, according to university spokeswoman Julie Bataille. McCarty and Vu are living with Vu’s aunt in Springfield, Va. The two spend between 45 minutes to an hour in the car, twice a day, before parking in Rosslyn and taking the GUTS bus to campus. Jarrott was able to find a spot in a Georgetown apartment with the help of craigslist.org. Boice is commuting from his family’s home in Rockville, Md.

“With the commute there’s no time to get involved. Our days at school are from 10 to 9 at night. There’s just no time,” Vu said.

Both Vu and McCarty, however, have been heartened by the efforts of Georgetown University Hurricane Emergency Relief Effort.

“It’s good to see that people care so much. It means a lot,” McCarty said.

Students haven’t been the only ones to relocate from ississippi and Louisiana to the Hilltop, however.

Loyola history professor Bernard Cook left his home in Jefferson Parrish, La., to be an academic advisor to the displaced students at Georgetown. He is currently living in Virginia with his son, Assistant College Dean Bernard J. Cook. Loyola English professor ary McCay has also transferred with the students. The two are considered visiting research professors and have been given offices, but are not employees of the university. Loyola officials have said the university will pay its entire faculty and staff their salaries for the semester, even though school is not in session.

Cook said he is pleased with all of the work that the Georgetown dean’s office has done.

“We are so grateful to Georgetown, not only for accepting students, but also for all the efforts of the academic advisors in trying to recreate their schedules” he said.

The dean’s office met with the 54 undergraduate transfers shortly after they arrived to try and match their Loyola schedules to Georgetown ones, although not all classes will transfer between the universities.

At Loyola, Jarrott declared his major in business with an emphasis on the music industry, but he was unable to take some of the classes on the Hilltop that he needs to graduate. Instead he will have to take a music course online through Loyola. The university plans to offer six or seven online courses, he said.

Cook said that all credits the emergency transfer students earn at Georgetown will be considered classes taken at Loyola.

Loyola will retain all tuition paid for the semester, but the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities has guaranteed that no Loyola student will have to pay tuition at their host university. Loyola President, and former Georgetown dean, Fr. Kevin Wildes, S.J., has promised that no student will have to pay double tuition, Cook said.