Transfer Nation Talks

A Conversation with Dr. Kate Lehman, NRC Executive Director

• Season 5

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When the news broke that NISTS would be integrated into the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition (NRC), the transfer community had questions — and understandably so. In this episode, host Heather Adams talks with Dr. Kate Lehman, NRC Executive Director, about how the integration came together, how she and her team are thinking about transfer's place within the NRC's broader mission, and what she's hearing and learning as she gets deeper into the work. For anyone still orienting to what this change means for the field, or simply wanting to get to know Kate better, this is a good place to start. 

Show Credits
Host | Dr. Heather Adams
Producers | Rhian Waterberg, Emily Kittrell, Caitlyn Potter Glaser
Sound Editing | Abraham Urias 

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Heather: Welcome back to TransferNation Talks, the podcast where we explore the people, policies, and practices shaping transfer in higher education.

Today’s episode comes at a really important moment for the transfer community.

A few months ago, many of us learned that the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition — or the NRC, as it’s called — would become the new home for NISTS, the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students.

Since then, I don’t know about you, but a lot of people in this transfer community space have been holding a mix of reactions: curiosity, gratitude, uncertainty, hope, and a lot of very understandable questions.

For some of our listeners, this might be your first chance to get to know the National Resource Center more closely. If you haven’t heard of them before, the NRC has a long history and a slightly broader infrastructure and focus than NISTS did. This includes multiple events, publications, and research streams across student transition and first-year experience related topics.

At the same time, NISTS, of course, built this really distinctive community and movement over more than two decades: this transfer-centered, cross-functional community that helped practitioners, researchers, and institutional leaders think seriously and practically about transfer.

So you’ve got these two really interesting, aligned, but distinct organizations.

Today’s conversation is really meant to do two things at once: to give our guest a chance to share how NRC is approaching the work, and to help the transfer community better understand what this integration between the two organizations may mean for them.

I’m really glad to be joined by Dr. Kate Lehman, Executive Director of the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, or NRCFYESIT. You can learn more about Kate’s career in her bio, which will be in the show notes.

Kate, thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to Transfer Talks from TransferNation. I’m your host, Heather Adams, founder of TransferNation and a lifelong transfer advocate.

Here at TransferNation and Transfer Talks, we believe that transfer success is everyone’s responsibility, no matter your role, title, or department. Today’s students and learners are mobile, diverse, and complex, but our systems have not kept up. The result? Too many learners facing hidden barriers, lost credits, and unclear paths.

This podcast is about changing that.

In each episode, we’ll spotlight real conversations with professionals, learners, and partners from across higher education — people you might not think of as transfer folks, but who all play a part in helping learners thrive.

So let’s break down those silos, challenge assumptions, and reimagine what transfer can be and who is accountable for realizing that success.

This is Transfer Talks, and you are right on time. Let’s talk transfer.

Kate: Thanks for having me.

Heather: I want to dive right in. I would love to start by helping listeners get oriented to the situation.

For many people in the transfer community, NISTS felt like this professional home, right? So this announcement that NRC would be the new home for transfer champions was pretty significant. It was a moment.

I’d love to hear you share how this came together from your perspective and how you and the NRC team have been thinking about this next chapter.

Kate: Well, it was certainly a moment for our team as well.

I’ll start with a little background. I came to the NRC in July 2024, and one of the first things I did was start a listening tour. Janet Marling, the former executive director of NISTS, was on the NRC’s advisory board, and the NRC and NISTS had a longstanding partnership.

She had been on my list to meet with, and I think it was maybe April 2025 before I finally got around to her on my list. She and I had an introductory call, I guess about a year ago. At that time, I was talking to partners about renewing MOUs and that kind of thing.

Janet was really transparent from the front that things were changing for NISTS. Our conversation pretty quickly shifted to: How can the NRC be supportive? What do you need?

At that time, Janet was still trying to figure out a path forward, but she told me that the thing that would be most helpful was if our staff could start taking a look at the website, the resources, and the events to see if there was anything the NRC might be able to take on should something not work out.

She had given me this, while she was absolutely still working on various prospects, but that was what she asked for. So our staff started doing that.

I think we checked in over the summer at some point as well, and she was still navigating various strategies. Then, last September, a few days before the Dear Colleague letter went back out, Janet and I communicated again. She let me know, unfortunately, that the path she was pursuing was not going to work out, and she hoped that our team had, in fact, been looking.

Our team had spent some time going through things, and I’m of the mind that when something is supposed to work out, it will feel pretty easy. I don’t mean to say that this wasn’t a lot of work, but we started looking and it was like, “Oh, NISTS has an awards program where they honor a transfer champion. Well, we have an award for first-year advocates that’s really similar.”

We present that award at the FYE conference, but we don’t have an award like that we present at the Students in Transition conference. So we could integrate that into our award platform because we have an organization award that we give out at the Students in Transition Conference, but not one for an individual.

That’s an example of the kind of thinking our team was doing.

As folks who are in this community know, when that Dear Colleague letter came out, there was also a form where organizations could throw their hat into the ring and articulate how they might be able to take the foundation NISTS had built and continue a lot of those signature programs and resources.

Our team threw our hat in the ring, and that started a series of meetings with Janet, Judith, Emily, and the team at NISTS.

It was a really wonderful process of getting to know each other and talking through how the NRC thinks about transfer and how it might fit into our broader agenda, how we could support some of the things that are really important to the transfer champion community, like an in-person convening.

I have a conference and continuing education team that plans all of our events, so that’s something they would be able to help with. It was really just a conversation about how we could weave this together.

That felt very organic, at least on my part. It seemed like we had some like-minded philosophies about, for example, making research really practitioner-focused. It makes sense. These were two organizations that had been friends and partners for a long time, but there was a lot of synergy between how NISTS was hoping things could work and how we were able to offer support.

From there, Janet and I worked through Thanksgiving. She and I were texting each other while baking pies, trying to work out the details of how this would work legally: who had ownership and all of that. I became good friends with our general counsel’s office here on campus.

We worked through that process ahead of the December announcement, and then it became official on January 2.

Though it might feel to folks like this has been happening for a long time, really, I only met Janet a year ago, and we’re only about three months into having NISTS officially be part of the NRC.

We’re still early in the process. Our team just had a retreat last Friday, and we’re sort of on a listening tour again at this point. We hosted a celebration of NISTS at the FYE conference a couple of weeks ago, and that was really wonderful.

We were able to have Janet, Judith, and Emily up on stage and acknowledge their many contributions to the field. Then they helped us facilitate a listening session there. We’re planning a few other opportunities for transfer champions to share with us directly about how we can execute for them and how we can show up for them right now.

Heather: We’re going to get to this synergy, which I love, because there is a lot of synergy between the two organizations and the work you’ve both been doing for decades.

Before we do that, I really want to get to what is actually changing, right?

There are a couple of ways folks can think about this. You could think of NISTS as continuing under a new umbrella, or you could think about it more like a fuller integration. You mentioned a few things that were very similar or aligned that you could easily see matching up or merging.

You’re probably figuring this out — like you said, it’s new, and you just had your retreat — but how would you describe, as clearly as you can, how you hope people are understanding what’s changing and what this might look like?

Kate: From the top, I want to make sure it’s clear that while we will continue to honor the history and legacy of NISTS, that organization was sunset. We’re still talking about NISTS because we want to acknowledge all of its contributions, but it will not continue under that banner, name, or branding.

For us, we’re thinking about this as taking the foundation NISTS had built and integrating and elevating that work within the NRC.

So it is an integration, but I don’t want it to just feel like an add-on. I gave the example of the awards, and that’s really low-hanging fruit where we’re like, “Oh, we have an existing structure. We can add this transfer champion award into our existing structure.” There are certain things like that where it’s just an add-on.

There are also some things the NRC clearly committed to when we went through this process. We are committed to having some sort of in-person convening. We don’t know exactly what that is going to look like.

I was telling Heather right before this call that Emily and our associate director for conferences and continuing education are in our conference room talking about how to best make that happen.

We’re trying to have some sort of in-person convening in the next year, but usually hotel contracts for conferences are booked five years out. So we’re exploring a couple of options.

One option is: What if we co-located and tried to change our hotel conference for FYE next year? We’ll be in Orlando in February, and February is also when NISTS historically had its conference.

Another option is to have a separate event. I don’t know. It’s going to come down to some logistics things, honestly, at least in the short term.

For us, we’re trying to think about the easy things we can do immediately to begin serving the transfer champion community. One of the other things we’re talking a lot about is webinars — things that aren’t a huge lift logistically but can provide space and opportunity for us to hear from that community more regularly. We’re talking with you and TransferNation about what that might look like.

Long term, FYE is what we’re probably best known for, and that’s just part of the air we breathe at the NRC. I want transfer to be like that as well, so that it’s not just, “Oh, we took the resources from the NISTS website and plopped them on our website.”

We will do that. We will move those resources so that they continue. But I want us to be committed to generating new knowledge, making new resources, and finding new ways — leveraging new technology — to connect with the community and build from that foundation.

So it’s not just an add-on, but an elevation of that agenda.

Heather: You mentioned that already, you’ve had some opportunity to talk to the transfer champion and NISTS community.

Transfer is complex, and I love this framing that you just laid out of having transfer be the air that we breathe. It’s complex, though. It’s rich. And there’s this area of research and practice that you all do such a good job in.

I imagine you’ve been talking to a lot of people and trying to understand, through those conversations, as much as you can for you and your team about transfer and this community.

As you’ve been thinking about that and getting more oriented in the space, what are you noticing and learning? What feels really important to you right now that you’re hearing?

Kate: I want to say from the outset that while I was not a transfer student myself, my husband transferred five times before earning his college degree. He went through a variety of institutions, and he and I were together for all of that.

My mom was a some-credit, no-degree student who went back as an adult learner and earned a teaching degree, and I also supported her through that process. So I have some personal experience with some of the things I am hearing from my colleagues.

My research background is in higher ed. I have a PhD in higher ed and organizational change from UCLA. My area of research has been more focused, honestly, even beyond FYE, on the experiences of students in STEM fields.

Even within that research, one of the things I focused a lot on was major change. Major change, kind of like transfer, is really big and complex. It’s not just like, “Oh, one day a student goes in, fills out a form, and changes their major.” It’s a whole identity shift for students and can be a process of trying on different futures.

For me, I’m using that existing scaffolding in my brain from both my professional and personal experiences to build as I connect with folks like yourself who are experts in this field.

We had Heather come and talk to us at a staff meeting recently. And I wanted to come back to Emily.

One of the wonderful things that happened in the transition is that we were able to bring Emily Cottrell, who was a staff member at NISTS, to come be our transfer expert in residence. The idea behind that — and I want to give Janet credit because this was her framing — was that Emily would come here and help transplant.

I really like that imagery because I think that’s a helpful way of thinking about it: taking the stuff that NISTS had built, transplanting it here, and helping it thrive and grow.

So we have Emily here as an in-person, right-across-the-hall-from-me resource who is talking to my team and helping us think through every aspect of this with her depth of knowledge.

I’m also doing a lot of talking myself to other organizations that focus on transfer, looking for new partnerships there. The NRC has a lot of organizational partners. For example, NODA and NACADA are two of our organizational partners. We are talking to other organizations that touch transfer in different ways to build out those networks.

That is a lot of context to say: yes, I am talking and learning and building.

I think the things that feel really important right now are opportunities where the NRC can leverage our unique position in higher ed for the benefit of transfer. Our existing community is made up of a lot of folks who are at transfer-receiving institutions because of our focus on first-year experience.

One of the things I’m really learning in conversations is that there is a deep need for those transfer-receiving institutions to take more onus and responsibility and be better partners to organizations and institutions that are primarily sending students. That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about.

I’m also hearing that transfer is really complex and has multiple layers of complexity. There are the technical components: how we actually transfer credit, how we assess for prior learning. All of those components really matter and have direct impact on student outcomes. They can be overlooked or treated as, “Oh, that’s just administrative,” but they have real impacts in the lives of real people.

Then, something that’s really familiar to us here at the NRC is this conversation about belonging and how people come to build connections with their institution. I feel really good about our ability to support transfer champions because that is also a conversation that happens a lot in the FYE community.

Heather: You talked a little bit about the complexity of transfer, and I want to get to this.

We’ve been talking a little bit about how aligned and similar the work is. You’ve got FYE, first-year experience; SIT, students in transition; and then transfer. I’m just going to say it: I think the word transition is doing a lot of work for us here.

I’m really interested to get into the granular of what that means for you and the work. Where is transfer placed in your broader definition of student transitions?

At a broad level, transfer absolutely belongs in this larger student transition conversation because there are things that are similar. But there are also these really distinct functions of transfer that work very differently, whether that’s the transfer of credit or the human experience, belonging, and identity part that goes along with it.

As transfer becomes really integrated into NRC, how are you thinking about transfer’s place in that broader discussion?

Kate: A little context that might be helpful for this audience: We are known as the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, and people often forget about the second half of our name. Admittedly, our name is a paragraph, and I understand. I get it.

But the students in transition component to the NRC was actually added in the ’90s. This is not a new thing the NRC just recently started doing. It’s been part of the conversation here almost as long as I’ve been alive.

I’ve talked to John Gardner about why he added the students in transition piece, and he talked about how he pretty quickly realized there were other inflection points that happen for college students. At the time, he was primarily thinking about what he called the senior experience, but now our team thinks about it more as the postgraduate transition to either career or graduate school.

Our team actually spent a lot of time over the past year refining a definition of students in transition because I think it is kind of nebulous and hard to be specific about.

We think about it as those key inflection points that students encounter in college, which includes the first-year experience. That is a key transition and key inflection point, but also the many other times in college where there are these paradigm shifts for students.

Transfer is absolutely one of them, but it’s not the only one. There’s postgraduate student success, but there’s also major change or academic recovery. Any of those times, sometimes they might seem small, but they are huge shifts.

You take an internship that convinces you that you have to change your major and your whole career plan. That is a really complex process.

Under the students in transition umbrella, we have a list of bullet-point examples. First-year experience is one, transfer is another, and then there are some others that are sort of their own sub-disciplines within higher education, where there are whole bodies of literature that speak to what the transition is, what the complexities are, theoretically how we should think about it, and how that transition impacts students.

For us, I would say we think of students in transition as this broad umbrella, and the transition points, like first-year experience or transfer, are subfields underneath it.

Whether or not students in transition is the best way to name that is up for debate. I will be totally transparent that we are going to employ a market research firm to see if there’s a better way to talk about this and to elevate it.

For us, first-year experience has always been the primary transition we are focused on under that umbrella. Transfer is now elevated, and we want it to be up there in that same holding. So we’re figuring out if that’s the right way to call it.

Conceptually, how we think about it at the NRC isn’t going to change. It’s more about whether there is a better way to name it.

Heather: It’s a great point because transition — I mean, you could make the argument that life is transitions.

Kate: Yeah, and in fact, when I got here, one of our colleagues was like, “Isn’t all of college a transition?” Which it totally is, right?

I’m not sure if there’s a better way to name that, but there are definitely clear times in college where there’s an inflection point that shifts your trajectory. Whether that’s your first year, a transfer between institutions, or whatever it might be, we know those times are particularly important for students’ trajectories. That’s what we’re focused on.

Heather: And distinct depending on life experience and where you are in your college journey.

Kate: Absolutely, for sure. How you experience those transitions is completely different based on who you are and your context, like you were saying.

I understand people being like, “These things are not the same.” But for me, when I think about them in terms of key inflection points where students need extra support, I do see lots of ways there are intersections across these sub-disciplines.

Heather: We talk a lot here about everybody being a transfer professional, in the sense that transfers are everywhere. They’re within all of the disciplines, areas of institutions, and functions of institutions.

It is that kind of magic of both being singular and unique, mixed with the fact that these are the learners of today, and they’re mobile.

Kate: Yeah. To that point, I think that’s one of the ways the NRC can really show up for transfer champions.

Because we’re thinking about inflection points broadly, we have a lot of the folks who maybe aren’t currently thinking of themselves as transfer professionals in our community.

I think it’s another great opportunity for synergy. In rooms that we host, we will have folks from orientation, first-year seminar, academic affairs, and student affairs. I think that sort of cross-institutional community the NRC has creates really great opportunities for education and helping more folks see themselves as transfer champions.

We’re trying to leverage that. This year at the FYE conference, we had transfer champion buttons, just to start having folks visibly identify as a transfer champion, even if they hadn’t thought of themselves that way before.

Heather: This is such a critical point. This idea of community — I love that you’re thinking about it in that way because NISTS didn’t just offer resources or events or the conference. Over time, it really built this particular kind of transfer-centered community.

It’s where a lot of us found our people, if you will. It felt cross-functional, relational, and grounded in the day-to-day realities of what we do, what our challenges are, and what we’re working on.

As we work toward transfer-specific professionals finding their place within NRC — and then, to your point, the NRC community finding its place in transfer and that mingling — I wonder what you are thinking about that community engagement looking like and feeling like.

What kinds of spaces are you and your team hoping to create for transfer professionals and advocates, and then for that combination of communities coming together?

Kate: I don’t know that I can give you a specific, because in my mind there’s a transfer-specific event, and then there’s also us elevating transfer at existing NRC events.

I’ll give you one example. The Students in Transition Conference happens virtually every fall. This year, it’s September 30 to October 2, I believe. I’m going to check those dates, but it starts September 30.

That conference has always included transfer, but Emily and Crystal have rethought it. When the call for proposals comes out, you will see that transfer plays a bigger role. Instead of being just sort of transfer loosey-goosey, it has more specific calls for things like credit, creating a sense of belonging, and other specific transfer-related areas.

So drilling down is one way of elevating transfer within that event, which also includes folks who work on other aspects. Last year, for example, there was some really great work presented at the SIT conference around parents and families. That’s another aspect of students in transition: parent and family programming.

Having transfer be more elevated within this broader umbrella means there will be other folks in the space who maybe don’t think of themselves as transfer professionals. That’s one way we’re concretely doing it right now.

But I also think it’s really important that we have separate dedicated spaces. I don’t want to say just for transfer professionals, since we’re thinking of everyone as a potential transfer professional, but for folks to feel like they can find their people. That is the part we’re still figuring out — where that happens.

I also think it needs to happen between events. It doesn’t only happen at a conference.

We have a similar vibe in our current NRC community where people really know each other. We have a lot of repeat attendees who come year after year, and then they find ways of getting involved. Maybe first they come and present at the conference, but then they approach us and write an article for one of our publications.

I hope that as we continue to stand up more transfer-focused opportunities, there are organic ways for people to keep being present at the NRC so that we can get to know them and they can get to know us.

Heather: So you’re basically saying crazy big transfer happy hour in Orlando?

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. That kind of thing.

What we tried a little bit this year at FYE was really new. First-year experience was six weeks after this happened. But we had a celebration at our opening session, transfer champion buttons, a listening session, and a number of transfer-related or transfer-focused sessions.

We curated a list of, “Hey, if you’re coming from a transfer perspective, here are the presentations we think will be most relevant.” Doing stuff like that at our FYE conference, and then, on the flip side, at our transfer event, making sure to elevate which parts of that will be relevant for folks in the broader NRC community.

I think it’s that cross-learning that’s very powerful.

Heather: You alluded to this earlier, but one of the other really important aspects of the work and of NRC is research to practice.

This is something I know NRC really emphasizes, but it’s also something NISTS really helped with: supporting practitioners in that direct translation of research to applied tools and learning opportunities.

You all have really strong scholarship, research publications, and dissemination of those research publications.

As transfer work continues to take shape within NRC, how do you all think about supporting that bridge between research and practice, scholarship and hands-on work, especially for the folks who are doing this work every day?

Kate: I think this was one of the places where it felt like such a natural fit because we were aligned in our vision of how research should really speak to practitioners.

It’s also part of why I came to the NRC in the first place. I really enjoy doing research, and I think of myself as a higher ed scholar, but I really don’t have a desire to conduct research and publish stuff that is going to collect dust.

I really want to do work that can be handed directly to the people in a position to make positive change for our students.

Our current philosophy, which will extend to our transfer work, is that we conduct rigorous research, and we also curate rigorous research. Sometimes we are publishing scholarly practice books where somebody else has conducted research, and we’re making sure anything we publish is practitioner-friendly.

Sometimes that looks like research reports that are pretty heavy on data, because sometimes practitioners just need data to go to their leadership and say, “This is what people are doing nationwide.”

But we shifted our research reports this year from being behind a paywall to being open access, and we’re also trying to make them a lot shorter because who has time to read a 100-page report?

Likewise, we also have guides that are not dissimilar from the guides NISTS had. We try to always have a practitioner on the writing team who brings that practitioner lens.

I think this is another place where I hope transfer champions will raise their hands, volunteer, and get involved with our work.

Another example is that we have a Substack called Insights for College Transitions. To be clear, transfer work was always welcome in that publication, but it is especially, extra welcome now.

There is a peer review process for it, but it’s meant to be practitioner-focused articles. It should be data-informed, but it might be drawing on assessment data, not necessarily a full-blown multi-year research project. That’s okay. It should be data-informed and really come from a practitioner lens. It’s short-form articles.

I think there are a lot of ways we can leverage existing structures at the NRC to continue this tradition of practitioner-focused research on transfer.

Heather: As we wrap up, you’ve done a great job laying out what is more concrete and what you know now, but things are relatively new. There’s a lot that’s in the development and planning stages.

But there is a lot that’s concrete, right? Like you just said, there are ways we could help transfer professionals understand where they can submit their research proposals or where they can plug in.

So it’s kind of a two-fold question: What are you seeing really concretely right now in terms of how transfer is placed within NRC? What feels concrete, and what feels like, “Okay, we’re still in the planning stages; we need to figure this out”?

Within that is the idea of: If I want to get involved, how do I get involved and when do I get involved? Is there something I can do right now as a transfer professional listening to this episode and wanting to connect, or are those things happening later — or both?

Where are you right now with all of that?

Kate: I’m going to start with the things that feel less clear. I’ve already alluded to them, but I would say there are two things that feel less clear.

One is the in-person convening. I know we are committed to it, but how it’s going to happen, we’re still figuring it out. Obviously, that involves the NRC taking on the most financial risk. We’re going to sign some sort of hotel contract or modify our current contract.

I guess I’m asking the transfer community that when we announce our plan — I hope in about two months — folks show up. We have heard from you that this is something you really want, and what will help us know if that’s the right thing to continue doing is if folks show up.

So we invite you to join us and are really hoping for a robust response when we do have a plan to share. It’s March 17, so I’m hoping by mid-May that we’re in a position to tell you our plan.

The second thing that feels unclear, which I also already alluded to, is that we have the students in transition umbrella. Is that the right way to be naming this work? It is really important to the NRC and to the University of South Carolina to elevate that in our profile.

We’re still figuring that out. Like I said, we have a market research firm that we’re going to work with.

What feels really clear are some of the programs that we knew immediately we would integrate. I mentioned already that we have an awards program, and we are integrating a Transfer Champion Award. We’re currently modifying our call for nominations, so that will be out soon. We really hope folks will nominate the transfer champions in their lives who are doing excellent work.

We also added several transfer-focused advisory board members to our board. I already mentioned Janet had previously been on the board, but we’ve expanded, so we are getting great input.

We have the Students in Transition Conference coming up. We’ve modified that to make sure it’s really elevating transfer. I welcome, encourage, and am excited to receive many proposals from this transfer community about the excellent work you’re doing.

We try to keep that conference really affordable. Registration is under $300, and it’s virtual because I know it’s hard for people to get money to travel places.

We also will be doing National Student Transfer Week. We’re really excited to plan that campaign and celebrate transfer students nationwide.

Those are some of the big things I see coming up.

I hope folks are following our social media pages. We have a wonderful communications team, and they do a great job of communicating what’s happening and what’s coming up.

We’re planning webinars. We’re working on a webinar for later this spring where we’ll have a think tank with TransferNation, and more information about that will be coming out. You can be the first to learn about it if you’re following all of our social channels.

That’s also where we put out calls for proposals. The Insights submission deadlines will be shared there.

We also have two groups: a LinkedIn group and a Facebook group where folks can pop in and ask questions. They are broadly focused. I think they have first-year experience in the name — I think it’s First-Year Experience and Student Success.

We just started those, so right now we would welcome folks to put their transfer-focused questions there as well. If it grows and we need to branch off, we will.

We still have a listserv, and folks are welcome to join it. It sure feels like 1998 called when I get a whole bunch of listserv emails in a day, so we’re trying the social groups as an alternative place for people to have organic conversation that’s threaded and isn’t invading my inbox at 9 a.m.

Hopefully, those are a couple highlights of places where people can plug in.

I also welcome people to contact me directly. My email is everywhere on the NRC website. If there’s a thing you’re looking for or a question you have, I’ll either answer it or get you to the right person.

We’re not a huge team here, but I have a really wonderful group of colleagues who support our work. We’re also really fortunate to be grounded at the University of South Carolina.

Before we wrap up, I want to make sure I include this as part of how this happened. The other piece of how this happened is that our Vice President for Student Affairs, Rex Tolliver, at the same time I was talking to Janet, also heard about what was happening and came to me and was like, “What are we doing about this?”

I was like, “Don’t worry, I’m already talking to Janet.”

It has come with just incredible institutional support.

In fact, a fun way to end is that at FYE, when Rex was recognizing NISTS, he also announced an additional $250,000 in support for research, practice, and partnership grants. I don’t know what that looks like yet, because I found out when he was on stage. He loves to surprise us with fun things like that.

It was very fun and really celebratory. But there’s real institutional support to make a go of this, and that matters so much.

We’re grateful to the University of South Carolina for all the ways it shows up for us, for the NRC, and also because they care about transfer students and making this better for students here and around the U.S.

Heather: Kate, thank you so much for taking the time to be part of this conversation. We really appreciate your insights and sharing, and we understand that this is a really exciting time with lots of opportunities — some that are concrete and some that are still in development.

Thank you.

I think what makes this moment so important is that it’s about more than an organizational shift. It’s also about how a professional community carries forward its relationships, its knowledge, and its sense of purpose, even when the structures around it are shifting and changing.

To our listeners, thank you for joining us for this conversation and for all the work that you continue to do on behalf of transfer students and the broader transfer community.

Kate: Absolutely. Same to you. Thanks so much for having me.

I think the best part of this whole process is that we grow our friend groups, professional networks, cheerleaders, and supporters. I’m so looking forward to getting to know the whole transfer champion community better and getting more people into this broader effort for supporting students and making college a really wonderful, fruitful experience for everyone.

Heather: Yay. Thank you.

You are listening to TransferNation Talks.

TransferNation is a community of educators and advocates working to improve the transfer and post-traditional student experience and celebrate transfer and community college as the pathway of success that it is.

You can join us here every week or so for conversations on, well, everything transfer.

From advocate conversations focused on grappling with today’s most important transfer-centric topics, to the nuts and bolts on transfer programming, services, and building more inclusion for transfers on our campuses, to transfer stories and the inside scoop from transfers and transfer alum.

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So be sure to join us on your favorite platform as we learn from and with one another to bust out of the status quo, disrupt systemic inequities, and reimagine, reform, renew, and regenerate educational opportunities that work for students — that center the student experience of today rather than what works best for outdated and ineffective processes and procedures.

Until our next conversation, from the whole TransferNation team: in transfer community and transfer pride, see you next time.


Head Shot

Dr. Heather Adams

Host