Coming into college at UMD, I had the notion that education here would be strikingly similar to high school – a set curriculum, with little to no classes students could choose to pursue their own individual interests more deeply. For example, two courses that stuck out to me in particular were CLAS276 (Are we Rome?), and MATH241 (calc 3). I took CLAS276 my second semester of my freshman year (Spring 2022), and had picked it because it satisfies two of my gen-ed requirements. I had originally assumed that it would be your typical history class – a boring, majority-reading centered study of history with a set answer to the question: Are we Rome? However, I was surprised to see that while the class did contain a decent amount of reading every week, the curriculum was built to foster our own individual perspective on the question, are we Rome? We were given large amounts of important information every lecture, and we were able to learn a lot about Roman antiquity that may have been overlooked or misrepresented. Furthermore, MATH241 also surprised me in the pace that we were able to cover the topics. In high school, I had taken calculus 3 at my school and everything moved at a much slower pace. Now, everything moves faster but is still at a considerably reasonable pace, where you are able to learn much more in much less time and still remember everything.
A huge difference at college compared to high school is the profound impact that your professors/TAs could have on your college life, experience, and grades. While it may seem a daunting task to approach some of your professors at first, if you go to office hours and actively participate and interact with the professor during class, your learning will become much easier. Office hours were basically useless and unnecessary in high school, but in college they are often more valuable than the lecture itself. Furthermore, fostering relationships with your professors is incredibly important for your future, as they are the asme people who will be writing your recommendations for jobs and internships. If you are unable to know your own professors well, they will not be able to write a personalized letter for you very well, and you may result in trouble finding jobs or having connections in the work industry.
Being able to adjust to college life is an essential part of your transition from high school to college. In the first month or two, and even throughout the entirety of college, you will meet so many people around campus. You’ll probably end up forgetting most of their names, but more importantly you will find for yourself a group of friends you are centered around, and they will help you cope with your adjustment. The greatest obstacle to pursuing these friendships is just reaching out to form these relationships – everyone is open to making new friends and a lot of people are just too scared to reach out. Open yourself up to every opportunity you get and make sure you go to a lot of events like football games and society meetings. For next year's freshmen: put yourself out there! Don’t stay hidden in your room sleeping or doing homework the entire day, go out and meet new people and make new friends.
Upon transitioning to college life, tws aspecst that I was entirely unprepared for was how disgustingly vile the diner food is, and the amount of work that you will have to do. While the food at UMD dining is *relatively* better than food at other colleges, it is still disgusting. I am not going to go much into depth about the food but just know that it is not as good as you will think. Buy the plan where you have a bunch of dining dollars, cause you will be finding yourself eating out more than you think. Next, there is a whole lot of work in college. In freshman year, it might not be as bad, since you are just taking intro classes and your teachers are only assigning a little bit of work that isn’t too difficult. However, as you progress along your courses and matriculate into upper 0 level courses, you will find yourself spending more and more time on your work and it will progressively become more difficult. What I recommend is to learn time management skills and organization skills as soon as possible, since it will help you a lot with college. If you put everything off until the last day, you will find yourself pulling a bunch of all nighers and chugging redbulls like me. However, if you get started on your work early you will have a much easier time staying on top of all your work.