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Has anyone transferred from a PWU to an HBCU or vice versa? I'm interested to hear what you think.
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I transferred from an HBCU (Xavier University of Louisiana) to a PWU (University of TN) after my sophomore year, and sometimes the differences are overwhelming, I went from a predominantly black school with maybe 5000 undergraduates in the middle of New Orleans (with no football team) to a predominantly white school in Knoxville TN, 35,000+ undergrads where the football players are treated like celebrities. There was so much that I had to get used to. On an HBCU campus, we didn't do a lot of "fight the power, we're being discriminated against" because we were all black, but once I got here, every week "we" seemed to congregate/have a meeting because somebody offended us or didn't accept us, or something. You have to get used to the politics, and since I'm from TN, I'm used to being blatantly discriminated against by professors and students..but that was something that I wasn't used to at Xavier. Xavier had tremendous spirit (even with no football team), and we stuck together, we came in as a class in hopes of all leaving together as a class. I miss that "family spirit", one smarter guy at Xavier used to take his own time to hold review sessions for like 50-100 people before a test, even got a room on campus, you don't see people doing things like that here. And the black people here, surprisingly, aren't as friendly or close-knit. (I too thought that because there were fewer of us, we would be closer, but no...) I'm used to smiling at people, saying good morning, but that doesn't happen very often, people looked at me like I was crazy for the first few months I was here.
Now on the plus side, Univ of TN is going to prepare me better for graduate school. I'm a Chemistry Major and we have professors who are top in their field, equipment that I wouldn't have had the chance to work with at Xavier, and research opportunties that I wouldn't have had at Xavier. This may also be because Xavier is a smaller school with not as many alumni, therefore not as many donations, and Xavier is a private school whereas UT is public. Because I am a minority, I do get special priviledges, minority scholarships, workshops, etc. Well, I think you guys get the picture, remember that these are the comparisons of two specific schools, and certainly don't speak for all HBCU's and PWU's, if I had went to Howard, I'm sure my experiences as far as research would have been different. While I appreciate UT, my heart will always be with Xavier, I'm applying to every HBCU with a grad program in Chemistry (only 3), and when I get my Ph.D. I plan on teaching at an HBCU.
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