New Girl Angst: Part One

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Transfer Student

This article is a two-part blog post! I hope you will read this and like it enough to enjoy the second one, which will be posted soon after.

Transferring in the middle of the school year if an incredibly difficult process. Not the literal applying part, where you choose the only courses left available mid-semester and talk about why you want to apply, but because I was shoved into a completely new environment only days after shadowing. I had never gone to a school of more than 200 people, never had a locker, never been to a school so large and confusing I needed a map , and on top of that and much more, I knew not one person in any of my classes. I thought that made it all the better; I could start off with a clean slate, recreate a better, more outgoing new me who was not known as the nerd girl of the school. I thought I was prepared for the entire ordeal; I thought I could just walk in, maneuver my way through the complexity of the social ladder, make a few close friends, and finish the four years as quickly as possible.

I was definitely not prepped for public school from the first moment in the halls to the end of that first day. I felt mortified walking to my first class with the guidance counselor, becoming an object of interest because of the figure of authority showing me around. People said hi, stared like I was some new specimen in their high school experiment, and generally talked to me very little in my first few classes.

The rest of the day went by fairly well. I had the most difficult time finding my way to rooms, trying not to look like the idiot new girl with the map pasted to the front of her face. I tried to act confident and friendly, like I was not having a mini panic attack all day. Only a few of my teachers introduced me to the whole class, which I was entirely grateful for. I had some problems, of course, I didn’t know how to open a locker, I had never seen so many people stuffed in one narrow hallway in my life, and I wasn’t accustomed to the fact that much of the work was just “busy work”, or assignments teachers give that seem like they’re there just to waste unwanted time. Lunch was probably the hardest part of the day; I had never been in a school cafeteria, and although the food was even worse than I expected, it was not the most horrendous part of the experience. I did not know anyone, and walking down the stairs into the large room, filled with randomly-placed tables and packs of students sitting and generally bustling everywhere in tight-knit groups made me want to crawl into a hole and never leave. After an anxiety-ridden few minutes of me standing off to the side with my lunch and feeling like crying, a girl from one of my classes called me over to her table. She allowed me to sit with her and her friends, and introduced me to all of them, which I was and am still entirely grateful for. I finally felt welcome somewhere, and even though I didn’t talk much that first day, I felt like I could belong there, feel relaxed, and complete high school with the high standards I set for myself. It only took one person saying my name in a sea of people to make me feel ten times better and happier, not to mention caused me to feel no regret for transferring to their, and now my, school.

Come back in a few days to read the second part of this two-section blog post! Also wanted to let you know that some pictures on this website are mine unless the caption has a copyright under it, and that the girl in the picture above is not me.

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