When Josh Winnes, a student from southern New Hampshire, started his freshman year at Boston College (BC), he felt optimistic about the academic and social opportunities he could pursue. Although he joined a Bible study and had a group of close friends, Winnes still questioned whether BC was the right place for him.
“When I was at Boston College, I was just there for my degree,” he said. “I had a decent community around me, but it would have been me and probably fifteen other people for all four years.”
His desire for his college experience to be more than just earning a degree led to Winnes’s decision to transfer from BC to Wheaton College after his first semester. He is now a senior studying mathematics with a concentration in statistics.
Jamie Desai, an admissions counselor at Wheaton, says that around 10 to 15 students transfer to Wheaton College during the spring semester, and about 50 students transfer in the fall, noting that community is often cited as a top concern for students coming in.
However, for Winnes, finding his community at Wheaton College was a relatively smooth process. He was presented with opportunities to make friends that weren’t as easily accessible at BC.
“The first semester, I was still getting used to things,” he said. “But right away, the second semester, I was on a cabinet in the Office of Ministry and Evangelism and helped start groups within that office.”
Winnes also attributed Wheaton’s relatively small size to his ease of getting involved. In addition to opportunities for a better community, Winnes saw attending Wheaton as an opportunity to grow personally.
“Going to Wheaton College was less about the academic prestige and more about the opportunity to develop into a well-rounded person,” he said.
When deciding whether to transfer, Winnes found himself asking about what he wanted his four years at college to revolve around.
“Do you want to spend four years amid a culture that’s just die-hard academics?” he recalled thinking at the time. “Or, do you want to be in a culture that will develop you and create opportunities for growth beyond the classroom?”
Many students at Wheaton are drawn by the same sense of community that Winnes found. Ben Fox, a senior studying international relations, transferred in the fall of 2023 as a junior from Gettysburg College. Although he was committed to the swim team there, he needed change and similarly questioned the meaning of community.
“I asked myself if over the next four years, if I took away swimming, would I be happy here?” he said. “I wasn’t happy, and my faith was not growing much.”
After concluding that he was unsatisfied with his experience, Fox started looking at other potential colleges and considered various factors, such as whether or not he would be able to remain on a swim team, their international relations program, and the cost of attending. He looked into other colleges, such as Rhodes College and Wesleyan University.
“But what brought me to Wheaton College was the Christian environment,” he said. “The best part of Wheaton is the brothers and sisters in Christ I got to meet here.”
Fox argues that his college experience has improved significantly since transferring to Wheaton.
“If I used one word to describe my experience, it’d be blessed,” he said. “I thought to myself, ‘imagine I never went here and had missed out on the impact that people and experiences here would have had on me.’ I haven’t looked back since.”
Although students such as Winnes and Fox came to love the small Christian community, its intensity pushed Arabella Hall to transfer out of Wheaton.
“I just never felt relaxed at Wheaton, and I wished that there would have been more ways to get involved that didn’t mean being in an academic club or a Bible study,” she said.
Hall transferred to Samford University after her freshman year. While at Wheaton, she played on the golf team, studied biology, and was also on the pre-medical studies track. The competitiveness within STEM classes contributed to her decision to transfer.
“I feel like the culture at Wheaton is one of busyness, and I found it hard to have a balance,” she said. “Wheaton has an atmosphere of perfectionism, which made mine a lot worse and made me spiral a little bit with anxiety and emotions, wanting everything to be perfect.”
Hall was concerned that part of that pressure also contributed to her lack of a strong community.
“I felt isolated and lonely at times due to the busyness I felt,” she said. “I didn’t have time to be involved in other fun activities because I was so busy.”
When she looked to transfer to Samford, Hall sought better opportunities outside of academics.
“I was attracted to Samford because of the community and the various opportunities for involvement on and off campus,” she said. “There are many ways to get involved in activities that don’t involve academics. The academics and community are a little more relaxed here, which is nice.”
Although Hall decided to transfer, she misses the close friends she made at Wheaton.
“I still love Wheaton, and I definitely miss parts of it,” she stated. “I miss my wonderful friends that I made at Wheaton, and I am thankful for my time there and how I grew as a person.”
Like Hall, Elena Everest, now a junior at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, transferred out of Wheaton in search of a better community and to improve her mental health.
“I have struggled a lot with mental illness, specifically anxiety, depression and ADHD,” she said. “I only found that my symptoms were getting worse the longer I was at Wheaton.”
However, the main factor that led to her decision to transfer came from Wheaton’s policy on sexuality. Specifically, the policy states that sexual relations should be between a man and a woman.
“I identify as bisexual and had realized this long before I started college,” she said. “I was comfortable with my identity but scared to open up about it with those around me.”
Eventually, the culture and policy around sexuality at Wheaton led to her decision to transfer out.
“I struggled with this throughout my time there but eventually reached a point where I no longer felt safe at Wheaton and decided to leave,” Everest said.
She transferred to Westmont to be closer to home, as she is from Santa Barbara. Since leaving Wheaton, Everest emphasized that her Christian faith has grown.
“By far, the most positive thing to come from this experience has been the strengthening of my faith,” she said. “This process taught me to trust in God and lean on him in times of loneliness.”
She explained that although Westmont is also a Christian college, Everest finds a more extensive variety of students who are and are not Christians.
“I have found that this environment has made me feel more proud to be a Christian and a follower of Jesus,” she said. “I have found the spiritual environment to be more welcoming of people wherever they are spiritually.”
Everest explained that, during her time at Wheaton, her experience with faith was quite the opposite.
“I struggled with my faith at Wheaton because I felt as though my faith was never good enough or strong enough and was constantly comparing myself to my peers,” she said.
Although students such as Hall and Everest endured hardships and Wheaton’s niche environment led to their decision to transfer, other students such as Elliot Chan, felt welcomed and drawn in.
Elliot Chan started college at Boston University (BU) in the fall of 2022 and soon realized that it was not the place for him.
“I felt lonely, as it was my first year away, and no one I knew back home was attending BU,” he said. “On top of that, I was an introvert going to be a part of a college campus of over 40,000 students.”
Since his last couple years of high school were during COVID-19, Chan said, he felt that the pandemic contributed to his challenging year and BU.
“We did not have a proper junior or senior education, and I found myself making bad decisions because there wasn’t anyone to hold me accountable,” he continued.
During the summer after his freshman year, Chan looked into other options, since he no longer wanted to attend BU. That is when he received an email about Wheaton’s gap year program, Vanguard. He chose to participate in Vanguard, which took place at the college’s HoneyRock Camp in Wisconsin and included a visit to Wheaton’s campus.
“I was immediately drawn in by how welcoming our hosts were as well as just the overall community,” he said. “We took a day and a half and sat through a day-to-day life and it just felt right to attend.”
While on this visit, Director of Admissions Evan Bennett noticed Chan’s interest in attending Wheaton and talked to him about transferring. After learning more about the process, Chan found that several factors encouraged him to choose to attend Wheaton instead of BU.
“The costs were much lower than at BU, and the campus was small and intimate, which fostered a more open community that shared at least one thing in common: acknowledging God’s love for them.”
Although the process of transferring proved challenging, as Chan had to make new friends and endure changes, Chan believes transferring to Wheaton was the right decision for him. He is now a sophomore studying environmental science.
“Overall, it was all in God’s hands and I couldn’t imagine what I would’ve done if I didn’t attend Wheaton College,” he said.
