#188 How to Successfully Align Majors, Credits, and Careers with Jaime Smith Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 0:52
Did you know Over a third of college students transfer before finishing their degree, whether your student is already in college and thinking about switching schools or you’re still in the thick of building a college list with your teen. This episode is packed with insights you don’t want to miss. It’s a pleasure to welcome Jamie Smith back to the show. She’s a nationally recognized college transfer expert and author of the new book, The Complete Guide to college transfer. We’re diving into the must know strategies around choosing a major, understanding prerequisites and how to plan ahead so your student doesn’t lose time, money or credits. This isn’t just about fixing transfer mistakes. It’s about preventing them in the first place. If your teen is uncertain about their major, or if you’re trying to keep future options open, this conversation will leave you feeling more informed and confident. I’m Lisa Marker Robins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity a flourish coaching production. Let’s dive right into a great conversation.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 1:56
Jamie, welcome back to the show. Thank you. I’m so happy to be back.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 2:02
Well, I mean, you’ve got big news, which is why we had to have you back on. You just finished writing the complete guide to college transfer it’s on your work with lots and lots and lots of students. You’ve really, for a long time, been an advocate for transfer students, but you hadn’t written a book before. Why now? Why do you think it’s this is the right time to finally dig it? I mean, yeah, gotta be a big undertaking. So there’s gotta be a good reason.

Jaime Smith 2:29
It is. It’s huge. It is probably the biggest challenge I’ve undertaken. But, you know, I counsel so many students and try to help them with transfer, and it’s just so challenging. There’s so many nuanced elements. And I thought, I can’t clone myself, so I need to find a way to get this information out to more people. And there really aren’t any resources out there. There really aren’t any other books, and there’s very limited information on the internet. And, you know, transfers make up a third of the undergraduate populations, so they need resources just the way first years do

Lisa Marker-Robbins 3:05
that’s okay, a third like, That’s wild.

Jaime Smith 3:09
Third of all undergraduates, more than a third actually transfer at least once in the six years up to graduation.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 3:18
Wow. And I have noticed since we had you on back and and I’ll put this in the show notes, but you were, you were here in Episode 140 and so flourish coaching, co.com forward slash 140 is how to find that episode with Jamie and what have we? We called that one. I got a look on the other screen avoiding the pitfalls of college transfers with Jamie Smith, which I know some of that was covered in the book. I really appreciated getting an early copy of the book. I read it. It’s fantastic. So I just want to leave with that. And I’m so excited about it, I reached out and said, Can we do a giveaway? So listeners, we are going to be doing a giveaway of Jamie’s book Between August 19 and August 31 2025 but if you miss out on that, we’re only giving one book away. Go there, enter to win. And if you don’t win, you got to buy the book, because it’s amazing. And you can enter to win at flourish, coachingco.com, forward slash, transfer. And as I looked at the book, loved it. Getting an early copy, I really wanted to make sure today you included the things we talked about last time. So if people want to go over and listen to like, what are the pitfalls? What are some of the mistakes that people make, we covered it in Episode 140 I wanted to be sure today that we don’t talk about the same things. You have a lot of chapters. I don’t have to how many was it? Oh,

Jaime Smith 4:47
gosh, like 2020, something, yeah, something like that, yeah. So I’ve going way over the initial projected word count. And my lovely publisher at New World library, let me keep it all so thank you. Oh my gosh.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 4:59
Ish. I rarely hear that they let you keep them all. Yeah, yeah. It tells you how good the book is.

Jaime Smith 5:06
Oh, thank you. Yeah, I hope so. But yeah, they said they thought it was valuable information. So it gets to stay. We actually use the size of the book to accommodate it. Wow,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 5:16
I love that. Well, my favorite chapter, as everybody can guess, is about majors and careers, because that is, you dedicated an entire chapter to it. Thank you so much. It was obviously my favorite chapter. So I want to do a little bit of a deep dive on that topic. We have that other episode, 140 about pitfalls and mistakes, and there is so much more in the book, but I was anxious. When I got the early copy. I was like, okay, and we should say it’s still not out. It’s coming when we go live, we’ve got a week till it goes out. So it is dropping on August 26 Yes, on Amazon, we’ve got the link for it in the show notes, but when you were writing it, I was curious. I was like, Okay, what does she talk about? Because I booked you on the podcast to talk about it before I even saw the Table of Contents, before I even knew. And I was like, Yes, an entire chapter on majors and prerequisites and careers and all the things. So that must mean that that’s an important topic. It is, why does it does go ahead?

Jaime Smith 6:23
Actually, in my opinion, it’s actually more important for transfers than for first years. So it had to be a big part of the book. Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 6:31
interesting. Okay, so why in your and I, I’m working with a student right now who may be transferring to another college, and the major journey and the career begin with the end. In mind that we talk about is part of the work that we’re doing. So I understand it from that, but statistically, because I’m not an expert at transfers, why is it more important, in your opinion, than a senior in high school?

Jaime Smith 7:00
Yeah, yeah. So when you’re starting out as a first year, you usually have some general education or breadth requirements that you’re trying to fulfill, and that gives students a little bit of time to try things out. Find out if they really do like the major they’re they’re aiming for, you know, take those first prerequisites. Find out if it’s really what you were expecting, or maybe, you know, dabble in something, get a Gen Ed requirement that’s also in a field of interest for you, and find out if that’s a direction you want to go. But for transfers who are coming in at the sophomore or junior level, usually they’ve completed those or they should have completed a majority of those Gen Ed and breadth requirements. So they’re really transferring right into the major. And so colleges are looking for students who have mostly completed Gen Ed requirements, have done prerequisites for the major, and they’re really ready to hit the ground running as sophomores or juniors, and they’re ready to focus on their major at the new university. Because very often that’s what you’re transferring for, is to have you know, that really strong major, and that should definitely be part of the search, because if you’re transferring in at that higher level, you have to know what you want, and you have to know that school is going to be a good fit

Lisa Marker-Robbins 8:06
for it. I love how you handled this in the book. I do have a question that is a little off topic from the majors and careers, but when you look at like, if 1/3 of students are transferring, did I state that correctly. I don’t want to mess up the data. 1/3 of students, if 1/3 of students are transferring, what are the reasons that they typically transfer forward? I know we’re going to go back to the deep dive on how it relates to majors. Obviously, one of them is, I get to a school suddenly, then finally, put in the work. I would say you got to do the work sooner or later. You might, in my opinion, you should do it earlier, but sooner or later, you need to do the work to figure out what the career of the major piece is. So that would be one reason, oh, they don’t have my major. Or you told a great story. What was the the nursing student story that you told in Oh yeah,

Jaime Smith 9:04
she had to reapply for some some transfer possibilities, because it wasn’t a direct entry program. She was there for two years, and then had to actually apply to the BSN program at her current school. So she thought, well, if it’s not a sure thing that I get to stay and get my BSN, I better apply for transfer to other programs so that I’ve got a school to attend where I can get my BSN, because she 100% knew that was what she wanted from day one. And, you know, ended up at a school where that path wasn’t guaranteed, and so she had to take extra precautions. And

Lisa Marker-Robbins 9:39
we should say, from an admission standpoint, the guaranteed path would be colleges that do direct admit to nursing. Some do, some don’t we have a previous episode on nursing. I’ll look it up here in a second when you’re talking but so she knew she had to, she had to make a change. Okay, what are other. Reasons that students transfer for

Jaime Smith 10:02
I saw a lot just after covid, of students who hadn’t fully vetted the university they were going to. You know, a lot of kids got their tours cut short. They couldn’t travel, and they were just kind of making a guess at where they wanted to be. So I saw a lot of upheaval around that. But even so, you know, sometimes students land at the place where, once they get there, they realize the vibe, the social fit is not quite right, the social fit roommates. You know, I try to discourage that, but sometimes students really are like, I cannot live here. This is not my place. And sometimes they’re right. Sometimes I courage, encourage them to make other changes. First, sometimes it’s a financial decision where, you know, they’ve decided to go for a really expensive, full pay program where they get no scholarships or financial aid, and they realize that that is just too much, and they’re not really prepared to pay that, or their parents aren’t for four full years. And then they think, well, maybe I should go to a less expensive school, maybe I should go to the state school or something, or, you know, deviate go through community college to save money. So there are a whole host of reasons. And, you know, there are a lot of really valid reasons, and people can sometimes be a little judgey about transfer, but once you start talking to the students and realize how many different situations there are that could necessitate transfer. It’s much easier to look at it all with an open mind.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 11:25
Well, I always say, as long as somebody is making an informed decision, they’re not just, like switching on a whim or which, okay, the sad, the bad roommate situation, yeah, be a like you said, you try to talk them out of it, yeah? Sometimes just no talking people out and stuff, right? Yeah. And

Jaime Smith 11:43
they do have a list in the book of like, before you decide to transfer, try these things first.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 11:49
Oh, that’s fantastic. So, I mean, we’re here to say, like, You’re not an advocate for transferring. Yeah, in a perfect world, you wouldn’t need to support students who are transferring, you wouldn’t need to write a book about this. Yeah, right,

Jaime Smith 12:03
yeah. Ideally, everybody would land where they need to be, find that it’s exactly what they wanted, and, you know, they have the major they want, and just everything would work out. And it’s just it doesn’t always work that way. And so I just want students to be able to choose, and if they find that they’re not in the right place, they have options. But, yeah, I mean, we always start by, you know, is this really going to be the smart thing for you? Because it’s always, always, I should say, almost always, more efficient to stay at the university you’re at and get your degree there than to transfer. Because you will, you know, you’re going through the difficulty of applying. And then credits don’t always transfer the way you think they will. You know, it’s definitely easier to stay where you are, so you have to really want to transfer and know that that’s going to be the change for you.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 12:49
You know, I think it was, it was early 2024 we did a deep dive study on the 50 state flagship universities, and we looked at who admits to major who doesn’t at all. Where does major play a role, surprisingly, and I talked about this with Rick Clark from Georgia Tech on our podcast back in April, even at schools that don’t admit directly to Major, the role that the intended major plays. Does impact admission, unknowingly to families, a lot of times, but we did this deep dive study, which, if people wanted, is it flourishcoachingco.com, forward slash majors, identifying what we learned were impacted majors. And you write about impacted majors in the book, can you do talk a little bit about what an impacted major is, in which majors you’ve identified that are impacted that could play a role in this transfer pathway?

Jaime Smith 13:55
Yeah, yeah. It’s a real challenge for students, both at the first year in transfer levels, these impacted majors where they may not know and it’s just a major that’s over popular, overcrowded. There are way more students who want to enter that major than there are actual spaces for them at the school. You know, there aren’t enough professors. The department’s not big enough to accommodate that many students. So, I mean, computer science is probably the number one. There are so many students who want to go into computer science now, and there just are not enough spaces. So sometimes you see these really distinct admission rates for for colleges that provide that information. You can see these really different rates for somebody who’s applying to be, you know, a sociology major, versus computer science, you know, it’s drastically different. And for first years, you know, they’ve they’ve got a little bit of freedom. They’re trying to figure out what they want. They’re choosing something. They’ve had to do some preparation for a really popular major like computer science, engineering, biology, psychology, business. You know. They’ve had to do some things to show that they are a good fit for that major. But when they’re transfers, they have to have done all these prerequisites. You can’t just decide you’re going to apply to computer science, because back in high school, you were part of the, you know, the Lego robotics league or something. You have to have done the calculus. You have to have taken intro coding classes. You know, you have to have those prerequisites down, so it’s even more of a factor, which means, you know, students who are thinking about transferring, they really have to prepare and make sure that they look like they’re ready to enter that major, like partway through, not just at the beginning.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 15:38
Yeah, I was just looking I was referencing your book. I just pulled it up here. So you listed in the book on page 128 computer science, engineering, business, any kind of health related career, pre med, nursing. That was a story that you told in the book, psychology, biology, as frequently, most frequently cited impacted majors.

Jaime Smith 16:02
Yeah, is that what you find too? Because you do.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 16:07
It’s interesting. I had Andy bourse on the podcast back in, I don’t know, 2022 I think, or 2021 and he, at the time, was Director of Admissions at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, he’s now at the University of Georgia, and he said, to your point, the overall admit rate at ui UC is about 50% but it’s 6% for computer science, and they favor in state students heavily. So he’s like, if you’re out of state, you’re, you know, pretty much count on not getting into computer science. Yeah. Now we have found and this is why we collected the data and we share it widely. And such an

Jaime Smith 16:46
amazing resource, by the way, thank you for doing that. I gave it in my file. That’s right, yeah, I love that resource. It’s amazing, but

Lisa Marker-Robbins 16:53
thank you. We thought it was really important, and we actually, we updated all the time. Indiana University just made some big changes with pre business, and they’re getting ready to announce changes for business. Again, to your point, falls into one of those. But we also found some wonky stuff, like at the University of Arkansas architecture, which, when we dug into the reason why, which I won’t even bore everybody with right now, it was a valid reason on the part of the university why it’s an impacted major, but you might get surprised by that. So that’s why you really have to look at this school by school, by school by school. Absolutely, I loved and I’ll try to find where you did it, but you have this fantastic graph in here. Yeah, you’re overlapping courses with your target University, A, B and C. Can you tell us a little bit about I like it because it’s an exercise, like, if you don’t have Jamie working with you can literally do this exercise to figure it out. And I even thought, for our listeners who they’re not even thinking about transfer, maybe they’re listening because they want to avoid transfer in the future for their now high school student. This is a fantastic way to support kids, but also to kind of explain how this works. Can you talk through that a little

Jaime Smith 18:11
bit? Yeah, yeah. I definitely wanted to create resources and exercises that students and families could go through on their own. And I’m going to have some downloadable resources, PDFs and copyable Google sheets on my site, so if people want to get the template, they can but for that one, you know, it was really about trying to be efficient with your prerequisite courses, because you are trying to fulfill those Gen Ed requirements at the same time, you’re trying to make sure it’s the right major for you. You’re trying to get those prerequisites done. And every school has different requirements for transfer you know, that’s true to an extent for first year admissions. But you know, high school students, they can only take what their school offers. So, you know, it’s a little more generic. Yes, you should have four years of English. Yes, you should get to this level of math for transfer students, it can be really specific, like you are not even eligible to apply if you haven’t taken calculus, or you haven’t, you know, completed econ one and two or something like that. So you really have to go through all of your potential transfer schools find out what their exact requirements are, both for any Gen Ed requirements and for major prerequisites, find out what is absolutely required versus what is recommended, and then look for the overlap. Look for, you know, okay, everybody wants calculus. So I’m really going to take calculus because one school wants bio, but the other two want Chem. So I’m going to take Chem first and then see if I have time for bio. You know, you just have to, you have to compromise, but do it in a smart way, so that you are checking off more requirements for a greater range of universities.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 19:50
Okay, that’s such great advice. I’m looking at the exercise over here. It’s absolutely fantastic. So thank you for that. Okay, so. You and I both were on a webinar about a week ago with a really Jeff selingo has another book coming out after yours. So by Jamie’s book,

Jaime Smith 20:13
yes, and he was kind enough to endorse mine too. That

Lisa Marker-Robbins 20:15
was I saw that you got an endorsement for

Jaime Smith 20:21
him taking the time to read my book and found it useful. And I’m so so pleased, because I’m a fan of his

Lisa Marker-Robbins 20:27
work. You had so many fantastic endorsements. Rick Clark was one of them. I saw that as well. He’s always so generous. He was so great on the podcast. But when we were on that webinar that Jeff had we were just attending last week, which last week, at the time of this recording, in July, he put a poll out there, and there were parents on there, there were counselors on there, a wide variety of people. And he was looking into what are the top reasons that people even go to college, and quite frankly, the area that I work in employability, careers was the top factor. If I think it was the very top factor, if not among the top, I think it was the top for going to college. And obviously that’s a non scientific poll, but a wide variety of people said we’re sending kids to college to be able to get a career. And I find that to be true as well. And I’m getting a lot of questions these days from families on, you know, employability, how do we even plan for future careers when things are more rapidly changing, and they’re correct, um, than they ever have been, and I’ve got great answers for that that we don’t we won’t take time to get into right now. How can I make sure that I’m future proofing my career path? Because everybody’s scared to death that AI is going to take away their job. There is a definite place for AI, but it’s not going to take everybody’s jobs. So how do you answer the question, which really is a top parent specific fear that I I’m actually hearing, and I think you’re probably hearing it from a different language of when a parent says, like, is this going to hurt if it’s transferring specifically going to hurt my kiddo with work opportunities, with grad school opportunities. Do you have any data? Do you have any like, what are employers saying? Yeah,

Jaime Smith 22:30
it’s a great question, and I understand that parental fear. You know, I’m a parent too, and yeah, I want my child to be employed and have benefits, all those good things that come, you know, come in life you want to be able to take advantage of those things. On the surface, transfer wouldn’t make a difference. You know, when you’re thinking about employability, all they’re going to see is your diploma. You know, most employers aren’t looking for whole transcripts to see your collection of credits. They’re just looking for the final outcome, you know, so for employability, I really don’t think it makes a difference when we’re talking about getting into grad school, sometimes it can make more of a difference just because they are going to be looking at your transcripts. But I always say, you know, everything is explainable, and if you have solid reasons for transferring and you explain, you know, here was my trajectory, here’s why I made this change. Here’s why it worked for me. Here’s why it was necessary. You know, that just shows that you are a critical thinker. You’re making a conscious decision that was well informed. You knew what you were doing, and who doesn’t want that in their graduate school program. You know, the one thing that I think can be a little challenging for transfers is taking advantage of things like internships or, you know, research opportunities. Sometimes that’s a little harder because you’re you’re just on a shorter timeline. But realistically, those opportunities are more widely available for juniors, juniors and seniors anyway, you know. So maybe they’re not in the pipeline as early to know what’s there. But still, the availability is usually in those last two years. So you know, there are definitely trade offs. But I don’t think there’s a blanket statement, and it will say 20% of master’s degree earners in the 26th 2017, year started at community college, very intentional transfers, and that’s only like half the transfer population. So there is some data saying it still works.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 24:22
We we actually talked at length in the previous episode that you were on 140 about planned transfers and how that works. So if you just heard that term, and you’re like, what, why would somebody plan a transfer episode 140 where we do kind of a deep dive on that. So, you know, that is that answers I think those concerns, and I think that I want people to challenge their thinking on like relying on the school to give them all the opportunities, like one of the things we do in my launch Career Clarity course. Course, is we’re not at the mercy of other people to create our opportunities. We are creating students who know themselves deeply and can even go out and create opportunities that are not necessarily posted internships or job shadows or employment opportunities, but charting your own path. But you’ve got to you’ve got to really know yourself and know what you want before you can go do that. So yes, the universities do have opportunities. Most of them are reserved for juniors and seniors, and you’re not at the mercy of other people all the time. You know you can create your own path. Yes, absolutely. I say that as an entrepreneur several companies, because that’s what I love doing, is just creating my own path. But it’s just saying like this is possible. You don’t have to be at the mercy of somebody else,

Jaime Smith 25:57
right? And you know, one of the things I say in the book, is make one of your first stops once you transfer, make it the Career Center and see what they have to offer, so you can jump right in and take advantage of it. Same thing for things like study abroad. If you want to do that, you just have to make that your first stop when you land on campus and find out what the rules are and how you can take advantage of what they have. And if they don’t have good pathways for you, then you make your own

Lisa Marker-Robbins 26:21
well. And you know what? It doesn’t stop while you’re on campus, I’m working with one on one, with a student right now who’s in our course, and I’m supporting him one on one, which I only do that for a small group of students. I don’t have a lot of capacity to do a lot of that, but he just graduated from an ivy and has great degrees, but not really sure what he wants to do with it. One of the things that we’re doing is, I’m like, you still have the availability of career the career planning, Career Resources, career development, and the alumni network. So one of his assignments in the last week has been to get connected with the alumni network, to do some informational interviews and and connecting with alumni in his area of interest. Yes, and that goes for your high school alumni as well. Yeah,

Jaime Smith 27:09
yeah. And this is another reason why students might want to transfer, you know, if they know a school has, you know, better ongoing support services or really strong alumni network, you know, that might be the school you want to go to to take advantage of that. If that’s you know, something that you see is deficient at your your current school, yeah.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 27:28
So a lot of kids go into college, like you said, thinking like they’ve got the money to pay. And you talked about and then it’s a shame they got to transfer. If we have a listener whose kiddos are not yet in college and they’re getting ready to make those choices, build a really great college list. Is there any advice that you have that in the book and the work that you’ve done with students that smart parents can take to be a little bit more financially savvy so they don’t trip up, because that’s one of the most painful ones. Like, your kid might be really happy on that campus, that campus might be really well equipped to get them into the future career, but then you reach this moment where you’re like, we can’t pay for it any longer.

Jaime Smith 28:15
Yeah, I always tell my families to do like a an sai estimator, you know, FAFSA estimator, to find out, are they going to get any need based aid, and if they’re not, then take a cold, hard look at their actual finances, what they have saved in five, two nines, you know, yearly income, and really think about what that college price, if you’re going to be paying full price, which you should just assume you are, you know, maybe you get a scholarship. That’s awesome. Don’t count on it if you’re paying that full price for four, maybe even five years, in some cases, what does that really look like in the big picture of your family, especially if you’re nearing retirement, especially if you have multiple children, you need to set a budget, and you need to stick with it, and not say, Oh, we got into this great Ivy will find the money. No, you’re not that money was not there. You’re not gonna find $30,000 in the cushions of your couch, you know. So you’ve gotta just, you know, make a budget, stick with it, and be upfront about that from the beginning, so your kid doesn’t get their heart set on a school that is just not a realistic choice. You know, work that into your initial search, and then if, for some reason, you end up transferring, you know, work that into the transfer search. You know, it’s the same thing for transfers. There are scholarships. A lot of people think there are no transfer scholarships. There are. They are usually smaller, though, so you don’t want to count on, you know, a full ride. That’s probably not happening. But there are scholarships out there, and so work that into your transfer search as well. You just have to be realistic from the start. Don’t get too attached and think about the big picture and what debt would look like down the line.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 29:54
Yeah. I just got an email this morning from a mom who they. Went through our launch Career Clarity course. Daughter is like on our pathway. She’s very she her resume. The resume building activities she did were just amazing. The mom kind of recounted them all for me, and she said, and I don’t think that we can afford the schools. What resources exist? And so I’m getting ready to reply to her with some of our resources that we recommend to families. But you know, Rick Clark and I talked a lot about he and Brennan Bernard in their book. Talk a lot about having family conversations. We put a conversation starter in our newsletter every week, because I think it’s about these transparent conversations that that we’re having, you know, as family, so that you don’t it reminds me of when my now 27 year old walked in one day and I was going through the mail and he caught me. This is back in like, 2015 or 14, so it’s been a while, but I’m tossing some of his mail in the trash can, and he’s like, What are you doing? And that’s my mail. And I said, I know that I cannot afford to send you to these colleges that are sent like Chicago had sent him something. I’m like, full pay of Chicago is out of this Mama’s budget, and you weren’t born into the right family for that. So therefore we’re not even going to look at it. I don’t want you to fall in love with the school that I can’t afford to send you

Jaime Smith 31:27
to. You know, it’s and it’s so hard to say something like that, but you know, it’s even harder when you’re throwing out an acceptance letter for that reason. You know, that’s a really

Lisa Marker-Robbins 31:37
great point. I should have countered with that at the time, I think of that quick response a federal offense Mom, I’m like, sue me, report me, whatever. Trent, but no, I mean, that’s a great point. Like I’m just throwing out brochures, which, okay, back in 2015 14, there’s a lot more brochures coming than online stuff, but I’m just tossing in the trash, but yeah, the whether it’s physically or virtually, throwing out the acceptance letter, that would be terrible, and that’s angst. And at that point, you don’t always have other options, and you’re already going to have to, like, start thinking about transferring. So we both work with students who feel really stuck and uncertain. And one of the things I always say is like it is possible to get unstuck in the work that I do with career advising, and I know you would not have written a book that went well beyond what the publisher told you you were allowed to write if you didn’t think that it was possible to get unstuck. Any parting words of advice to our listeners,

Jaime Smith 32:44
yeah, you know, one of the quotes I put in there is an old one about, you know, you’re not a tree. Like, if you don’t like how things are for you, you’re not a tree. So change it. And I think that is just a really important point, whether it’s your job or, you know, where you live or a marriage or where you’re going to school, like you have to take charge of your life and make it what you want it to be. And if something’s not working, change it. There. Almost anything is changeable. You know, there’s very little we can’t pivot away from or pivot into. It’s just a matter of how much work and time and energy and sometimes money we want to put into making the change. So my message to transfers is, if you are really in a place where it is not working, or if you’re maybe an adult who’s been out of school for a while, and you’re like, I think I want to go back, there are ways to get that done. It is possible. And there are lots of schools who want to enroll you, and lots of employers who will want to employ you, because, you know what, if, as a transfer student, you are scrappy, and you figure things out, so you’ve got a lot of good, transferable skills there, seriously,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 33:52
like that that just leans into the soft skills you just, again, answered the question of, should we be concerned about being able To get a job, I agree with you, most things are figureoutable and changeable. I do always preach that like you know when you’re in high school that you’re on an eight lane interstate right and when you start down the path, the number of lanes do narrow. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t still exiting in entrance ramps and, you know, all the different things, but it’s just like the kid I said, who just graduated from the ivy, like he’s like, I am not going back to school right now. I must figure out a job. I don’t want to go do any more school, right? Or if somebody came to me with a great opportunity right now, I’d be like, Are you kidding? I’m 56 years old. I’ve got kids and grandkids and aging parents all in Cincinnati, Ohio. I’m not leaving, right? So we do our path narrows, but it’s not a dead end. Yep. Completely. Hey, flourish, coaching. Dot com, forward slash, transfer. Enter to win a book from Jamie and get your free book. If you we will redirect it to all the resources after August 31 so you don’t miss out on getting well resourced regardless. Jamie Smith, thank you for making more time for us.

Jaime Smith 35:20
Thank you for having me. I appreciate getting to spread the

Lisa Marker-Robbins 35:23
word Always a pleasure.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 35:30
If your student is in college or college bound. Jamie’s book, The Complete Guide to college transfer, is a must have resource. Whether you’re hoping to avoid an unplanned transfer, or one to make a smart one, it will walk you through every step. We’re giving away a free copy to one of our listeners with a US. Mailing Address, head to flourish, coachingco.com, forward slash transfer to enter for your chance to win through August. 31 2025 thanks for listening and until next time, keep taking those small, intentional steps that lead to big clarity.