Ask any student on the Tufts campus, and chances are, he or she will vividly remember the difficulties involved in entering higher learning: the essays, the applications, the dreaded FAFSA.
Most students, luckily, dealt with the process once and have since put it out of their minds. Transfer students, however, had to begin the process all over again when they came to Tufts.
Most transfer students agree that filling out the actual application is not terribly difficult. "It's not as big a hassle as it is applying to colleges out of high school," said Alex Lauritson-Lada, a junior who transferred from Trinity College.
The simplicity of Tufts' application - coupled with its comparatively late deadline - influenced senior Dan Lavine. "I chose Tufts because they have a late application deadline," he said.
Transfer students are required to fill out an application very similar to a regular application, but with an additional essay asking why the student wishes to leave his or her previous institution and come to Tufts.
Director of Transfer Admissions Leon Braswell said that the process is about to become much easier. "This year, [transfer students] will be filling out the Common Application for those coming in January," he said.
While the application process itself may be relatively simple, being accepted into Tufts as a transfer student is not easy. Although the acceptance rate for transfer students is approximately the same as that for incoming freshman, transfer admission tends take factors like compatibility into account, along with academic records.
"For example, if you're coming from a business school, we don't have a business program, so if you're going to take accounting and management, where is that going to fit?" Braswell said.
After students are accepted into Tufts, their decision to actually attend can be affected by the very large issue of financial aid. Financial aid packages offered at Tufts often differ from those offered at previous institutions.
"[Trinity] gave me significantly more money than Tufts does," Lauritson-Lada said. "It's somewhere in the realm of an $8,000 difference in financial aid."
One transfer students said that her first school's aid was more generous due to merit scholarships, something Tufts does not grant its students. "The only complaint I have is that Tufts doesn't have merit scholarships," said second-semester junior Kenny Hickman, who had a merit scholarship at American University.
Once transfer students do actually begin their matriculation at Tufts, they must deal with the hassle of transfering their credits. Students may only transfer 17 credits within the Liberal Arts school and 19 credits within the Engineering school.
"We couldn't in good conscience award a degree from Tufts University if you had taken more than half of your courses someplace else," Dean of Students Jean Herbert said.
Because Tufts uses a different credit system than many universities, the transfer process involves converting hours at a previous institution into Tufts credits, a process that Herbert said is "very standard" and does not differ depending on a student's previous institution.
"Three or four semester hour credit courses from a previous university equals one Tufts credit. That's it," Herbert said. If a student came from a quarter system, Herbert explained that "we total up all the credits ... and divide by 5.25."
Although Herbert describes the process as "very straightforward," some transfer students would disagree. Lavine explains that when he transferred to Tufts, one of his professors "took the liberty of combining several classes into single credit classes here ... so I basically had four classes go down to two, in my major."
Getting enough credits transferred within a major was even more difficult for senior Chris Babayan, who came from Georgetown University. "A lot of my credits didn't transfer, and because of that, I had to switch majors," Babayan said.
Still, not all students have difficulty switching to Tufts. Those who come as sophomores rather than juniors or seniors seem to have considerably less difficulty, since fewer credits need to be transferred. Junior Matt Kruger described the process as "easy" and said that "[he] got everything [he] wanted" in terms of credit transfer.
Other students have difficulty transferring AP credits to Tufts, since all schools vary in their treatment of advanced placement courses.
"I would have been a junior at American in what was my sophomore year here," Hickman said. "I had skipped a year because of AP credits." However, because Tufts doesn't accept AP credits in the same manner as American University, "I was pushed back a year," Hickman said.
Herbert said that acceptance of AP scores may vary. "Each department makes that decision separately," she said.
Hickman, however, has a different explanation for credit transfer. "Dealing with bureaucrats is difficult anywhere - it doesn't matter where you are," he said. "They were bad at AU, they're bad here. They're bad in different ways, but they're still bad."
Still, Hickman said, "All is well in the end."
