It was the first day of class and the Teaching Assistant at the front of the room invited us all, in standard practice, to introduce ourselves: name, year, major, hometown.

“My name is Alyssa Meza. I am a sophomore transfer student to Medill, so I guess I’m weird.”

That is how I introduce myself at Northwestern University. It became standard practice during Wildcat Welcome Week as I milled about campus with hordes of freshmen and the handful of other transfer students. But then Welcome Week ended, classes started and I still introduce myself as a transfer student. Somehow being a transfer student, without me realizing, had become an intrinsic part of my identity at this school. It was like some tick or compulsion. If I were not a transfer student, then who was I?

Keri Disch, the Medill’s director of student life, told me I was one of four transfer students to the school, though sometimes I have serious doubts the others actually exist. Okay, they probably do exist; I just haven’t seen them.

Since there were too few Medill transfers for our own peer advising group during Welcome Week, we were in groups with freshmen. Freshmen are great, but they’re not me. I’ve already been one. I didn’t want to be confused as one again, so I began tagging along with a Weinberg sophomore transfer student and became an unofficial part of her peer advising group. I went to their dinners, activities and rarely mentioned the fact that I was actually in Medill.

One afternoon, I joined my adopted advising group and other Weinberg transfers on a trip to Chicago. After spending some time in the city, one of the peer advisors asked me, “Wait, do you even go to Northwestern?”

Good question. Was I really a Northwestern student? Maybe this was all just an elaborate dream. Maybe I would wake up tomorrow in a dorm at the University of Missouri, my freshman-year school, wondering how long it would take me to hitchhike back to Chicago. I was in limbo. Neither freshman nor sophomore, I began to brand myself as the sophomore transfer. “Oh, I am the sophomore transfer,” I would say to faculty in the journalism school. “Oh, I am a transfer student,” I would say to other Medill freshmen. “That’s why you never see me at the EssentialNU’s.” In case you were wondering, transfer students, lucky us, are deemed to have enough prior college experience to bypass learning about sex, drugs and alcohol during the first week of school. Most of us have endured similar orientation programs before, or at least have spent enough nights spooning the bathroom toilet to have learned.

Nevertheless, a lot felt like an extended episode of déjà vu from my freshman year at Missouri. It was the same endless choruses of “Welcome to the university!” and the little voice in your head that yells, “Must make friends NOW.” I was anxious about the first day of classes.

I had been around the block before. Except that block was the University of Missouri. This block was different, and I felt as though it was judging me. As hard as I tried to not be pegged as a freshman, I found myself doing all those obnoxious freshman things seasoned students make fun of. I asked what Quartet was. I asked people on campus where Swift and University halls were. I walked into the wrong Political Science discussion. I only recently found out you could use points at Starbucks. Labeling myself as a transfer student seemed like the best way to explain this kind of behavior. “No worries, guys. I’m not dumb; I’m a transfer.”

I hope I get past this instinct to point out that I am different and just be another Northwestern student. The quarter system will no longer seem overwhelming. I will know the campus like the back of my hand. I’ll finally figure out how to navigate Plex. Actually, maybe that last one will never happen.

But on Friday someone asked me where the entrance to the Plex dining hall was. It felt good to finally respond, confidently, with directions I knew were correct. I think it’s time to introduce myself as just Alyssa.