Imagine starting your freshman year at Lang not actually at Lang, but thousands of miles away.

This was the case for Emma Anderson and the 15 other students who have so far participated in the “First Year Abroad” fellowship, a partnership between Lang and the non-profit organization Global Citizen Year, which began in 2012 and allows fellows to spend their freshman year in Senegal, Brazil, Ecuador or India.

When these students come home they find themselves lacking the support they need to transition into on-campus life as Lang sophomores, because there is no orientation geared specifically to their unique needs.

“I felt sort of out of place and sort of lost, too. It was hard. I think a support system would have been so great,” said Anderson, a senior global studies major who went to Ross Bethio, Senegal, as part of the fellowship.

“I came and it was like, ‘Hi, I’m not a freshman, I’m a sophomore, and I haven’t transferred, I just came from Senegal,” Anderson said.

Anderson organized a dinner in early October for all the fellows, giving them a chance to swap stories and compare notes on their rocky transitions to Lang and their frustration at the lack of support from administration.

“I wish there was something that was already made for us,” said Cierra Bland, a sophomore global studies major who returned from Ecuador in April. “Like a dinner that the school had organized for us to come together.”

Other students agreed. “There wasn’t anything significant organized for our entry into on-campus life,” said Alan de Leon, a senior philosophy major who spent his freshman year in Brazil.

The First Year Abroad fellows are invited to attend the events geared towards transfer students during Orientation Week, but this pushes them into a box that doesn’t fit them, they said.

“Going to transfer student events, it still felt like it was for freshmen, just coming from a different place,” Bland said. “It felt like it didn’t really have anything to offer me.”

In many ways, the study abroad fellows have unique needs when they arrive on campus. Though they’ve already been New School students for a year, they may have trouble finding common ground with wide-eyed freshmen who are completely new to the college framework.

Yet unlike transfers or sophomores, they are new to university life and new to the Lang campus.

On top of that, they have just finished an incredibly intense experience and need to re-acclimatize to their country and culture.

“Reverse culture shock is a huge thing,” Anderson said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re home!’ But then having it be so foreign.”

Somehow, they need to find their place – and carving out that place all by themselves can be difficult.

“Technically, I was a sophomore,” de Leon said. “But in reality that technicality meant nothing, on a social level: I didn’t know what New York City was like, I didn’t know how to get around, I didn’t know anyone on campus, and I was a sophomore but I felt like a freshman.”

“It’s difficult to find people who understand this weird position you’re in,” Bland said. “At the dinner, I was asking a couple of the fellows, ‘How was your transition? Did you have friends?’ And they were like, ‘No we didn’t — it sucked.’” With a laugh she continued, “I wish I had known earlier that they felt this way too, because I was like — four weeks in and two breakdowns.”

Lang administrators plan to make more effort to ease the transition for First Year Abroad fellows. “That’s a project that I’m working on, not only for the First Year Abroad program but for all study abroad participants,” said Assistant Dean Matthew Walters.