Loneliness is an epidemic, and college transfer students are feeling it.

In Spring 2021, Mark Istvan Ledeczi-Domonkos, 20, decided to transfer colleges. He started at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and quickly realized it wasn’t for him. “It has all the worst parts of being a Southern school and none of the best parts,” the 21-year-old joked. To him, transferring was a no-brainer. “I didn’t really have a choice, to be honest,” he said. “I was there, and I just didn’t feel at home.”

Istvan Ledeczi-Domonkos decided to take the leap from the South to the North and became one of about 2,300 students who transfers to New York University (NYU) annually — and approximately 2.1 million nationwide. Despite there being so many people in this position, when talking to transfer students, one thing was shared between all of them. “[NYU] was like getting into a community where everyone already knew people,” Istvan Ledeczi-Domonkos said.

The challenging integrating process that Istvan Ledeczi-Domonkos experienced can develop into loneliness, which has become an epidemic among college students since Covid-19 hit in 2020. A study completed by a group of researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health reports that 71% of adolescents and young adults report experiencing loneliness. Today, loneliness is one of the world’s most severe public health crises, with isolation and loneliness being more deadly than smoking and obesity. So what spurs this feeling? According to the same study, change is one of the main contributing factors to loneliness.

Changing schools challenged Sara Amiraly, 21, when she transferred from George Washington University (GW) in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2021. “It wasn’t fully my decision to transfer,” she described. “It was more of a financial thing where my parents wanted me to go to a school with a higher ranking for them to get their quote on quote money’s worth.” Amiraly had already found a solid friend group at GW and struggled to leave that behind. “I made the best friends I’ve ever had at GW,” Amiraly said. “It was really hard to start from scratch.” The change of coming to NYU itself was really difficult for Amiraly. “[You’re] in a new city, going to a new school, not knowing anyone, and really starting over,” she explained.

Mary Joye, a licensed mental health counselor, confirmed that Amiraly’s struggle is common. “Change is hard,” she said and pointed to something called adjustment disorders. An adjustment disorder is an emotional or behavioral reaction to a stressful event or change in a person’s life.

Rob Danzman, another licensed clinical mental health counselor, further explained adjustment disorders in transfer students. “We are literally taking an individual, removing them from a tribe (their previous college), a series of known experiences and buildings and professors, and we’re putting them into the unknown,” he said. “For a brain, that’s a terrifying event.”

According to Danzman, many of the current emotions we experience can be tied to ancient instincts. “If we don’t have friendships, if we don’t have a tribe, the future looks very lonely,” he said. “Friends are a very concrete way of imagining a future.”

Finding new friends was a big topic of concern for these transfer students. Kasey Goldenberg, 20, transferred to NYU in the spring of 2022. She was previously at the University of Virginia and had difficulty finding her place in Charlottesville. “From the minute I got there, I wasn’t a fan,” she expressed. “It just wasn’t a good fit for me.”

She was drawn to NYU after having what she joked was an “Eat, Pray, Love” moment in Florence, Italy. She saw the NYU abroad campuses and knew a city would better fit her. When Goldenberg came to NYU in January 2022, she was thrust right into the middle of a school year. “It was weird at first because I didn’t know a soul,” she said. “I was really nervous about finding a place.”

Joye says that social anxiety is common in the younger generations. “Gen Z is incredibly socially anxious,” Joye said. “Social media made all of us anti-social.” That, combined with the pandemic’s forced loneliness, has been difficult for everyone. Humans are made for connections, she explained. “Loneliness is almost always centered around trauma, like a big change. When people are traumatized, they shut down.”

Rob Danzman echoed this idea. “When we feel lonely we start shutting down,” he said. “When students are in a new environment, they don’t even realize that they’re hyper-vigilant, it’s very difficult for them to quiet that brain down.” The body and brain are trying to protect us from what it perceives as threats, new places, and new people.

For many transfer students, the most challenging part of coming to NYU was the lack of opportunities to meet people. For Mimi Gewirtz, 21, NYU’s lack of campus was tough to find a place. “It was really hard to get into the life here,” Gewirtz said. “It was hard to get used to a new school and find friends without the programming or events that freshmen have.” Gewirtz transferred to NYU after spending a year at the University of Birmingham in England. Her goal was always to transfer to NYU, but it wasn’t as easy as she thought it would be. “It was really lonely and pretty isolating,” she said.

The help that NYU offers transfer students is scarce and lacking for these students. After transferring from GW during Covid-19, Sara Amiraly was let down by what NYU had to provide for incoming students. “Resources weren’t really there for students who had transferred while things were completely virtual,” she said. “It was really hard to make friends virtually, and I wasn’t even on campus, so there was no way I could meet up with other transfer students who were going through the same thing as me. It was really isolating.”

Mary Joye says that the best way to confront this type of social anxiety is to simply go head-on with rejection. To prep them for the rejection, she does one simple thing, “I ask them if they like everyone they meet,” Joye joked. When they inevitably say no, she reminds them that they can’t expect everyone to like them. “You’re not trying to get everyone to like you,” she said. “Only 10% of the people in the world will like us, and you just have to weed through the other 90%.”

Danzman agreed with the importance of putting oneself out there. “​​You can’t control whether someone is into you or not or whether they had a good day. You don’t control any of that,” he said. “What we can control is, can I get your butt in a seat where there are other people that are like-minded? Yeah, we can control that.”

After transferring from the University of Virginia, Kasey Goldenberg found this was just the kind of risk she needed to take. “I knew I needed to put myself out there to meet people,” she said. “If I just kind of sat back, no one’s going to come up to me; I need to do it.”

“It’s not rejection; it’s selection,” Mary Joye says. Going out and starting is the tricky bit. “Trust yourself, and you will find who you’re supposed to be around when you’re yourself.”