Transition to BU e-board members Phoebe Bitzer (CAS’26) (from left), Noelle Tegan (CAS’25), and Sara Howie (CAS’25)

Student Life

Transfer Students Find Community with Transition to BU Club

Group offers mentor-mentee pairings and large social events to make adjusting to campus easier

Sara Howie spent her college freshman year at Holyoke Community College, choosing to stay close to home during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a sophomore, Howie (CAS’25) reapplied to BU—her high school “dream school”—as a transfer, with the hope of moving to the city for a welcome change of pace. She’s not alone: hundreds of transfer students matriculate to BU each year. In the 2024-2025 academic year, the enrollment rate for transfers was 915 students. 

Howie credits her success on campus to the friendships she found in a club led by transfer students, for transfer students, called Transition to BU (TTBU). On joining, she was paired with a mentor—who’d been a transfer student—she describes as a “built-in friend,” who helped her navigate housing, class registration, and BU’s Study Abroad program.

“It’s always nice to be able to talk to someone who’s been in your shoes, and TTBU offers transfers the opportunity to connect in a way that you won’t find elsewhere on campus,” says Howie, who is now one of TTBU’s mentor coordinators. “It’s especially valuable for transfers at a big school like BU, where it’s so easy to feel lost in the crowd.”

Headed by an executive board of former transfer students, TTBU assembles semester-long pairings of mentors and mentees (those just arriving on campus). The organization hosts events, like arts and crafts nights or an escape room outing, to bring everyone together, but also encourages each of the mentor/mentee pairings to meet frequently on their own time.

Noelle Tegan (CAS’25) transferred from the University of South Carolina as a sophomore and joined the club during her first semester on Commonwealth Ave. Now TTBU president, she decided to join when she received an email from the Dean of Students inviting her to apply for a mentor. Tegan is also one of the executive board members assigning the mentor/mentee pairings, and she emphasizes that for these matches to be successful and fulfilling, it’s important for the incoming transfer students to be detailed about the sort of partnership or camaraderie they’re looking for.

“We ask them a lot of specific questions, like if they could have one thing in common with the person they’re paired with, what it would be, whether that’s major, cultural background, where they’re from, or what school they transferred from,” Tegan says. “We ask them to be as specific as possible, to maximize the efficiency of the matches that we do.”

For many new transfers, their TTBU mentor is their first friend on campus. This rings true for Tegan, who stayed in touch with her mentor long after her first semester at BU, even landing an internship with the help of her local connections. And meeting with her mentor regularly throughout the fall, whether for a shared meal in the GSU or a quick chat over coffee, was exactly the push she needed to branch out further—during the following semester she joined a Panhellenic sorority and a handful of clubs.

As someone with a front row seat for the organization’s plans and activities, Tegan says there’s definitely been increased interest on both ends of the mentor/mentee pairings. 

The executive board’s aim is to get as many people involved as possible, but mentor applications are typically on a first come, first served basis to ensure that mentors have only one or two mentees each. They undergo a training process, led by the executive board, to familiarize them with all the on-campus academic and mental health services to point mentees to if necessary.

For Phoebe Bitzer (CAS’26), another current mentor coordinator, who transferred from Emerson College as a sophomore, the benefits of the program are clear, from both a mentee and a mentor standpoint.

“Transferring to BU can be a bit overwhelming in the beginning, so having a group of people who have gone through it themselves and can help out really made a big difference for me,” Bitzer says. 

As a transfer student, integrating into college life is often trickier since you’re joining midway. That’s why Tegan’s parting advice is so important: “The more you maximize opportunities to meet people, the more likely you are to meet that person that you might really connect with and will make BU feel like home.” 

Want to find out more about TTBU? Check out their Instagram page (@transitiontobu), where they have an email list linked in their bio. Students can also contact Debra Marcus, assistant director of transfer success at dmarcus@bu.edu