Manuel's "Expectations vs. Reality" Reflection Essay

My first semester of college has not been typical by any means. I guess this was to be expected since I didn't move into the residence hall in the fall. Because of this I would say that I really haven't got to have the real "college experience". However, there have been some upsides to being at home and attending classes online.

Since I'm a biology major, the classes I take outside of CPSG are mainly STEM classes. The nature of their structure is not what I would have expected of University courses. Since they were all held online this semester I feel like I lost out on a lot of the hands-on type of experience you would normally get from a chemistry lab for example. Instead of being able to do the experiments on my own/ with a group of people, I have to watch the professors and TAs do them through a screen. I think the delivery aspect is similar to this as well. Since classes were online, many asynchronously, I think it was a lot easier to lose focus and also put off watching your lectures. Whereas in a normal setting, the only way to do good in a class was to actually go to the class at that specific time and focus on the material being presented. This did have its upsides though because I did enjoy the flexibility in my schedule since I could pretty much attend a lot of my classes whenever I wanted to. As for graded items, I think they were quite similar to what I would have expected from a University course. The classes were pretty content heavy and most of the points of the courses came from the midterms and then there were some other smaller assignments such as quizzes and homeworks. Then outside of the STEM classes, there was a lot more project based work and also more writing involved, along with the occasional quizzes.

For CPSG100, something I didn't expect us to talk about so much was science itself. Even though the class is called "Science and Global Change", I didn't anticipate for us to talk about things such as the scientific method and logical fallacies. I think I and many other students interpreted the title more as the science of global change. This is why I was quite surprised when the beginning of the course was pretty focused on science as a whole. Even though we did talk about climate change I thought that we would dive into it a lot more. I thought that we would have explored causes and effects more heavily and even some potential solutions. I know now that this is what we will be doing in the coming colloquiums. I also expected there to be many in person out of classroom activities, but obviously due the circumstances that was unable to happen. Some of the out of classroom activities we did experience were the excursions. Many of these involved watching presentations on zoom. As these were still interesting, there is just a different type of experience when doing activities around other people. I am definitely looking forward to the field trips and other in person activities that SGC has to offer in the future.

Life as a University student attending classes from home on zoom was definitely not what I envisioned when I was in highschool. In highschool I envisioned college as a place where you would meet so many new people, and just have a lot of fun, new experiences because of the freedom that you have living in the dorms. However it has been what I expected once I knew I'd be staying at home. I knew that staying at home I wouldn't really meet any new people or get to experience that new found freedom that college students who live on campus feel. On the other hand living at home does have its positives too. I'm saving quite a bit of money by not dorming, and I also get my own personal bathroom!

My advice to future SGC students (assuming they will be on campus) is to try to be more outgoing and take advantage of the opportunity that you have been given. I know that if I was on campus in a typical semester I would have tried to get to know as many people as I could because you never know who you could meet. I'd also advise you to try and get a routine/schedule set up early. This provides a lot more structure to your day and I have it to help motivation. I feel like when my day lacks structure, I tend to do a lot of things aimlessly because I'm trying to be productive but I don't know where to start.

Last modified: 12 December 2020