Going to college can be both an exciting and terrifying experience. For a majority of students, it is the first time going to a school outside of their hometown. However, that is not always a case. There is a population of students who have been to other schools outside of their hometown and the University of Wisconsin-Platteville is just the next stop in their educational career.

According to insidehighered.com, about 30 percent of a college’s population is transfer students. With that, people and students do not always know about all the physical and mental labor that goes into transferring to a new school. For some students, transferring is an even harder process to go through than applying to a variety of colleges their senior year of high school. According to the New York Times, one in three students who apply to college for the first time, will end up transferring at one point.

The transfer process is very different than entering a school your freshman year. Students have to go through a variety of hoops in order to transfer to a new school. The first hoop, is simply finding the right school to transfer to.

“I toured two different schools,” Madeline Zilles, senior, chemistry major said. “I chose UW-Platteville because it was the only one that had my major.”

Picking a school that has your major is one of the hoops transfer students have to jump through. You may love the campus of one college, but if they don’t have your major, you have to move on to another school.

Getting into the right classes is another struggle that students have to endure. Sometimes choosing what school to go to is dependent on what classes you need to graduate, and what classes you can get into.

“I transferred from UW-Madison to UW-Platteville because all my classes for the past year kept getting full at Madison, which pushed my graduation date by a year. So, it was nice to come to a university like Platteville where I was able to enroll in classes easily without changing my graduation date,” Halley Planinsheck, senior, biology major said.

The last major hoop a transfer student needs to jump through is paperwork. The amount of paperwork that goes into transferring can pile up but if you use your resources and advisors to your advantage, transferring can be a much easier process. So, even though transferring is full of hoops; there is always a way to make it through without getting stuck.