When I received my admission letter to Georgetown, I was filled with a myriad of emotions and questions as I considered accepting the offer. Most stemmed from the same fear: How would I adapt to a new school environment as a junior transfer student? Reddit was filled with warnings — that it's hard to find community, hard to catch up. I read every thread I could find before setting foot on campus, and they weren’t wrong, exactly. They just weren't the whole story.

After arriving at Georgetown with my new identity — a “transfer” — I realized what I really wanted was to blend in. That meant somehow gaining, in a different way, the advantage of those first two years: the friend groups, the campus knowledge, the sense of already knowing how things worked. What I did not want was to be handed a separate track labeled “for transfers,” another thing to set me apart before I had even unpacked my dorm room. The real story, it turned out, was not that Georgetown lacked support for transfer students. It was that by treating us like any other incoming student, the school managed to cultivate a genuine sense of inclusion.

After arriving at Georgetown with my new identity — a “transfer” — I realized what I really wanted was to blend in.

It’s true that the logistics of transferring can be a nightmare. For me, it involved tedious tasks like credit audits that required digging up old syllabi or tracking down past professors. But that’s just the beginning. Once my credits were approved (not all, of course), I had to get acquainted with Georgetown's core curriculum on my own. Figuring out the intricacies of my intended major meant scouring through a multitude of PDFs. How else would I have learned that finance electives are half-semester classes and some are only taught in the fall or spring, not both? Then came class registration, where I found that most of the courses, both inside and outside the business school, were already full, waitlists included. My schedule wasn't what I wanted. Who willingly signs up for an 8:00 a.m. accounting class? 

Another big worry that manifested was the social gap. Although subtle, it was very present. First-years bond, partly because everyone is new at the same time. When they get to their second or third year, that sense of novelty tends to wear off. Transfers come into a class that has already built a year’s worth of shared experiences, whether in run-down freshman-year dorms or eating questionable food at the dining hall. I found people to be generally friendly, but the divide showed most clearly in Georgetown's extracurricular club culture, where “recruiting” targets the first- and second-year classes.

Another big worry that manifested was the social gap. Although subtle, it was very present.

Thankfully, I was part of the Business Undergraduates Invested in Leadership Development (BUILD — note: Georgetown loves its abbreviations), a pre-orientation program at the McDonough School of Business open to incoming first-years and transfers alike. It was the first thing that made this all feel manageable. BUILD gave me something no Reddit thread could: an insider's view of how the business school actually worked. Professors lectured on their own departments and the majors they offered, which is where my interest in international business first took shape. Days were filled with helpful workshops (like one on resume formatting, whose guidance I still use today) and site visits to companies like Deloitte and Boeing. It’s also where I learned about the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, which I applied for and completed the following summer. 

Most importantly, at BUILD, I connected with new people, most of whom weren’t transfer students. I met not only incoming first-years but my mentor and coordinators in my own grade, all of whom were happy to talk about their own experiences and help out wherever they could. They took me out for coffee chats to learn more about clubs that interested me, and I got feedback on my applications from current members once recruiting season started. I wasn't navigating these applications blind; walking into that process already knowing people who could talk me through it mattered more than I expected. The connections made that week stuck. Additional programming like intramural soccer kept me connected to the cohort (we lost in the playoffs… yet it's one of my favorite memories from that fall semester).

Transfers make up a small share of BUILD's cohort, but the program never made me feel like an afterthought. Part of that comes down to design choices most transfer-specific programming doesn't make. Georgetown has a transfer community, too, with a council that hosts events connecting new transfers to each other. These spaces matter, but community with other transfers isn't the same as being woven into the broader student body, and it's not the thing most people struggle to find. 

What helped me most was BUILD's mentor structure: two or three students per mentor, someone with enough bandwidth to actually answer questions or point me toward someone else who could. Compare that to new student orientation, which every transfer technically gets to attend. The ratio there is closer to two student volunteers for every fifteen new students, and the cohort isn't a small group you get to know; it's the entire incoming class. It's no surprise that most transfers I knew skipped the bulk of it. BUILD, by contrast, caps its cohort at forty students and requires an application, so the people in the room actually want to be there. 

None of this was built with transfers specifically in mind. BUILD exists for anyone new to the business school, transfer or not, and that's exactly what makes it work so well for us. The program isn't solving "the transfer problem." It's just built well enough — small mentor ratios, a selective cohort, programming that runs all year instead of one week — that transfers benefit from the same design that helps everyone else. 

That's the model worth copying: not a separate track designed "for transfers" but programs sized and structured so that anyone new, whatever kind of new, gets seen. I loved my BUILD experience so much that I came back the following year as a mentor.

Jorge Mendoza Castro graduated from Georgetown University in 2025. He studied finance and international business.