Think back to the beginning of your freshman year. (For seniors, that was four years and what may seem like several hundred exams ago, but try.) Remember that feeling of being caught in a sea of strangers? How about the overwhelming sense of helplessness the first time you tried to navigate pre-registration? Now imagine being the new kid in college twice – maybe even two years in a row. You have a second New Student Orientation, a second set of degree requirements and a second school to figure out. A new dean is probably the least of your worries. Luckily, transfer dean advising is one issue that the College has seemingly figured out. Or has it?

The transfer deans within the College – the undergraduate school at Georgetown that admits the largest number of transfer students each year – are incredibly adept at what they do. The problem is that transfer students only benefit from the expertise of these specialized deans during their first year on campus.

The transfer student experience is different from the freshman experience in that it poses a set of questions and problems that generally don’t concern freshmen. In some cases, much of the credit that transfers accumulate at other institutions is not applicable to the College core requirements, or does not translate to Georgetown credit. In other instances, transfers may have spent one or two years pursuing a major at their first school that does not exist in the College. (Ethnomusicology, anyone?) As a result, transfers often have to fit four years of requirements into six – or fewer – semesters.

The transfer deans within the College provide consistent and reliable answers to the unique concerns of transfer students. Often, they were the ones who read the transfers’ application essays and throughout their students’ first year transitioning to Georgetown, they come to know their students well. For students who enter the Georgetown universe their sophomore or junior year, these deans function as advisers who help their students hit the ground running in the race to a timely graduation.

But after that first year of transfer-specific advising, transfer students are assigned to junior and senior year advisers like all other College students, placing many of them with advisers unfamiliar with their unique situations. More importantly, the rapport a student develops with his or her first dean – the dean who eased the transition to Hilltop academics – is lost.

The switch from specialized to general advising has its merits, however. The upside of placing transfers with regular deans after their first year is that it better integrates them into the mainstream academic culture at Georgetown and allows them to take advantage of the valuable advising finesse of the upper-class deans. The primary deans in the College tend to specialize in a few majors and advise many of the students within those majors.

What we ought to remember, however, is that transfer students do not stop being transfers after their first year of transition; their initial questions do not disappear. As the system functions now, transfer students in their second year at Georgetown must continually explain their individualized academic standing and deal with their transfer credits with new deans who often don’t cater to transfer needs. As a result, some transfer students simply return, unofficially, to their original deans out of convenience. By doing so, they take time away from the new batch of transfers who have an equal need of transfer dean aid.

For students who have already uprooted themselves at least once from another university, a certain level of continuity in their interaction with the Office of the Dean is not just helpful, but crucial. The university and the transfer deans provide a welcoming and stable environment for fresh transfers. Whether it requires hiring more transfer-specific deans or training more of the current deans to handle transfer issues, the first-year model for transfer advising ought to be expanded to the second and third years.

Switching schools is a stressful undertaking. Having a consistent adviser to consult with about squeezing a four-year plan into two or three years would help transfers breathe easier.

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