COLUMN: ?and maintain transfers' network

A year ago, I was preparing to become a college freshman -- all over again. After my first semester at school, I decided that something was wrong. Sometimes I blamed the school. Or, I blamed fate: "I just wasn't meant to be there." So I became a transfer student. Transfer students are a remarkable group. Ask just about any transfer student, "Why did you leave that school?" and you'll get an animated response. However different those answers are, something ties them all together: We all chose to leave, to go through the hassle of reapplying to college (in my case, five of them -- I was determined to be somewhere else sophomore year). And most importantly, we all chose to go to Penn. I received a bunch of mailings last summer from a girl named Julie who was really excited to meet me and take me on a tour of Philadelphia and direct me to the cheesesteaks. I was apprehensive about what my new school could be like, but I arrived the week before classes to start my transfer orientation, desperate to get off to a better start than I did the previous year. The next few days were decidedly the most important days I have had at Penn. Unfortunately, future transfers might have an experience decidedly worse than that of their predecessors. The University doesn't sufficiently fund transfer orientation. New Student Orientation and the Student Activities Council provide money for mailings, photocopying and an official gathering, but most of the activities aren't University-funded. In those four days, I met more than 150 people, most of whom I now recognize by face if not by name. I became friends with many of them, and they've become my confidants, advisers and roommates ever since. And I'm not the exception. Transfers are friends with transfers who are friends with more transfers. Transfers date transfers. Transfers are probably linked psychically to other transfers. But when the transfer-orientation coordinator sank $1,000 of her own money into last fall's events and then failed to recoup her investment from the University, the future of the orientation -- especially as an institution of welcoming and support -- looked unpromising. That's not beneficial to the Penn community, which thrives with the help of transfer students. We bring our unique experiences and ideas from other schools -- schools like the universities of Colorado and Toronto and Colby College and the U.S. Military Academy, to name a few -- into classrooms and throughout the campus. I didn't go to "Camp Penn" (as I've heard Penn students label freshman orientation), and I didn't live in the Quadrangle. Fortunately, transfer orientation exists -- along with transfers who religiously return to act as advisers. Inevitably, advisers continue to support and ease the transition on a more personal level by befriending new transfers. That vital network is in trouble. This summer, instead of counting the days until I began my new life as a Penn student, I watched as University President Judith Rodin broke ground for the controversial Sansom Common development. I watched La Terrasse, the oh-so-fashionable bistro on Sansom Street, reopen after more than $1 million in renovations. Irvine Auditorium closed in preparation for the financially and functionally questionable Perelman Quadrangle project. And I looked up in horror as I saw those lights on top of the high rises, flooding the campus in an unnecessary, almost Las Vegas-esque glow. In short, I followed what has become a golden age for Penn -- where everything will be bigger, brighter and newer and will cost a heck of a lot of money. I support the effort to make Penn a better place. I'm not going to take on the overwhelming task of telling the University what it should and shouldn't build. I'm concerned about those inordinate sums of money being spent on projects that are not specifically and exclusively student related. In my one year here, I've never heard of SAC being overfunded. And although I wasn't at Penn at the time, my friends tell me about the abandoned plans for the Revlon Center at 36th and Walnut streets. After years of delays, Rodin and Provost Stanley Chodorow in 1995 scrapped the proposed $65 million student center. But is $120 million for a complex devoid of student space any cheaper? More than 200 new transfers will arrive in less than a month to our campus. I hope that the University will make these students feel as welcome as I did -- so they won't transfer again.