Rachel Vitello
News Editor
According to multiple KSC transfer students, credits not transferring over, lack of explanation and a poorly set up orientation all contributed to a difficult transition on the road to becoming an Owl.
KSC Holocaust and Genocide Studies major Kate Cipolla transferred to Keene from Norwich University in Vermont this past fall. Cipolla also transferred from a community college after one semester to Norwich. While Cipolla has had her share of roadblocks with her credits at KSC, she said that she was surprised with the amount of credits KSC was able to take.
“I left Norwich with roughly 60 credits and about 40 transferred over, which was more than anyone in my family was expecting,” Cipolla said. “Norwich is notoriously tricky about credits leaving and I guess Keene is notoriously tricky about taking them, so it was surprising to me how many they took.”
Cipolla also gave credit to Keene for the efficiency of setting up her schedule upon transferring.
“Signing up for classes my first semester at Norwich took me, and this is not hyperbole, the whole day, because the registrar kept sending me back and forth between different people. It took me like 15 minutes here and I was blown away. I didn’t know you could do that,” Cipolla said.
Despite this, Cipolla is still confused about exactly what her academic year is at the moment. Another KSC transfer student, Kirsten Somero, also is not sure what her academic year is. While traditional students who come in with zero credits can simply state whether they are a freshman, sophomore, etc., transfer students are left with the ambiguity of the progress bar on the MyKSC page.
“Professors or advisors will ask you what year you’re in and I’ve just started saying ‘I don’t know, no one will tell me,’” Cipolla said, “We’re (transfers) all kind of guessing what year we’re in and it makes it really hard to sign up for classes and to know when we’ll graduate. It’s really frustrating not having this specific thing on MyKSC.”
While transferring was one obstacle in regards to Cipolla’s number of credits, changing her major at the beginning of this semester has also set her back. However, if some of her credits from Norwich had transferred over as ISP credits, Cipolla would not have to be as concerned. When Cipolla came to Keene as a creative writing major in the fall, her progress was about halfway through.
“My progress is now about a third or a fourth of the way through,” Cipolla said. “It does make it more difficult that some of the courses I took at my previous school, which would be ISP courses, are now not considered, but it is trickier to tell because I changed my major so late.”
According to Academic and Career Advisor Jennifer Drake-Deese, it is college policy that students can only transfer one upper level ISP course when they come to KSC. Any other upper level ISPs a student must complete needs to be taken here at KSC.
As for other courses, the process begins in the Registrar’s Office. Transfer students have their final transcripts from their previous school sent over to the office and it is checked that various criteria are met for the classes to count for credit. This criteria includes that the courses were taken at either a degree granting institution or are at least college level classes and that the final grade received was a C or better. Courses that are graded as pass or fail are eligible to be transferred, but will not transfer automatically. The class needs to be evaluated and the student’s previous school will be contacted for how they define ‘pass’; whether or not ‘pass’ is considered a C or better there.
General courses and lower level courses tend to transfer more easily than program specific courses — classes that count towards a major. Registrar Barbara Cormier said that this is something Academic and Career Advising (ACA) or a department chair handles.
“They (ACA) can determine whether or not it’s an upper level course and transfer it in as a generic upper level ISP,” Cormier said. “If a student was hoping for it to come in as a specific course, that would be a program issue. ACA wouldn’t be able to equate an upper level course to something specific.”
This is where department chairs come in, along with many transfer students’ struggles. Somero said that a course she took at Mt. Wachusett Community College for her psychology major almost was not accepted towards her psychology major at KSC.
“I had to petition to get one of my psych courses counted towards my major because they wouldn’t count it at first,” Somero said. “I had to get my old course syllabus and bring it to the head [of the psychology department] like, ‘this is the class I took, it should count towards my psych major here.’”
Somero and Cipolla both said that a better orientation geared specifically towards transfer students may have helped ease some of their problems. Cipolla said she attended the transfer student orientation in the summer, which she found did not address many of the issues transfers face. Then, when she came back in the fall she was lumped in with the freshmen orientation for welcome week.
“It is weird being a transfer student, being 23 and surrounded by 18 year olds. It’s a funky process,” Cipolla said. “It would’ve been easier if they got into some of the confusions students face and some of the frustrations.”
Somero said she also had a similar experience.
“I was treated as a freshman. I did meet with one of the advising transfer people but she kind of just said ‘oh you’re on track, you’re fine’, no ‘here are things you have to do to graduate.’ They didn’t treat me as a transfer student which made it hard to find information about stuff,” Somero said. “My entire orientation was ‘how to adjust to college out of high school’ and I’d already been to college. I didn’t know if there were actually accommodations for transfers to sit down and figure out how you can take your classes and transfer credits and all that.”
Drake-Deese said that this is something the college hopes to work towards improving in the future, but struggles to maintain at this point in time.
“We try to treat them as much like transfer students and not like this is their first experience at college, but at the same time there’s basic information to Keene State that we give first-year students that is good for transfer students to know too,” Drake-Deese said. “It’s a tough balance. How do we help them feel like a transfer student and a more mature student, but at the same time give them that opportunity to get the basics they need to know about Keene?”
For now, Drake-Deese and Cormier both suggest to incoming and current transfer students to talk to someone either in ACA or the Registrar’s Office who can either help them or direct them to the correct person to help. Cormier said students should be proactive and if they think something doesn’t look right in their progress, to reach out.
“I don’t think it should deter anyone from wanting to transfer to Keene,” Somero said. “It’s a good school and I like my classes. It’s just something to definitely keep in mind.”
Rachel Vitello can be contacted at
rvitello@kscequinox.com.
