Free t-shirts!(Marc Chou/DP)

This week the senior class will kick off Feb Club, an annual tradition of debauched fundraising. Feb Club marks a month of drinking, eating and socializing emphasis on drinking. There’s palpable excitement among my classmates as we gear up for a month that will test our abilities to balance work and play to the limit. But about 200 of my classmates, including yours truly were almost excluded from Feb Club.

You see, I’m a transfer student, and as a result I’ve never received a single e-mail about class events. That means every time there was a study break or a Skimmer, I either heard by word of mouth, or not at all. It’s not a major insult and I know it’s not intentional, but it’s one of the many minor ways that transfer students are placed on the periphery of the Penn community.

So many of Penn social groups are formed during Freshman year. Out of the 8 people in my house this year, 5 know each other from their hall in the Quad. Transfer students are already placed at a disadvantage trying to integrate without being left out of the loop completely.

Terrence Kennedy, a senior who transferred to Penn from William & Mary describes the awkward position of transfers: “All the transfers know each other, so I hear about Penn stuff in general, but class specific stuff you get left out of.” This can lead to a stark disconnect between transfers and their classmates, to the point where Kennedy doesn’t even know Senior class President, Andy Kaplan’s name.

What’s most frustrating about the situation for students like Kennedy and me is the problem requires such an easy solution. It doesn’t require an advisory committee or a vast overhaul of housing or registration, it’s as simple as adding our names to a list. As usual though, the responsibility is left in our hands. Today I e-mailed listserv@lists.upenn.edu, the e-mail address in charge of class listserves to request to be added to the senior class listserv. I would have done it sooner, but like many of my fellow transfers, I didn’t even realize there was a listserv I wasn’t on.

About 300 students transfer to Penn every year. It seems trivial, but it’s the little details like being left off class listservs that create a divide between Transfers and their classmates.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.