Going into college, I, of course, expected change. This was the first time I've lived for a long period of time without my family and also the first year of my adult life. With these (pretty substantial) changes I took on greater independence, learning to manage my time, my responsibilities, my relationships with those around me, and even my daily routines in ways I didn't have to before. Many parts of my experience have aligned with my expectations following high school but reality has also disagreed with my prior impressions in a number of ways.
Going into college, I expected lectures to be much more impersonal than classes were in high school. Given the nature of class sizes this of course turned out to be true generally, but it was also interesting to see how the personalities of different professors/lecturers came through in the content. Many of my professors this semester were incredibly passionate about the material they were teaching, often more so than my teachers in high school. In fact, in many ways my college classes have been more similar to my high school classes than I expected. Of course, my classes this year are much more test-weighted but many of them still had quizzes and homework assignments similar to what I had in high school (though, with the exception of CMSC132, these were a much smaller portion of my grade). Any projects I had this semester were also much more open-ended. In CMSC132, an introductory computer science course, I still had projects like before but the design of my classes was much more up to me and much more variable. While my high school programming classes felt more like following a checklist, my class this year needed me to think more about the problem as a whole and design my program in a way that best addressed it. The project guidelines were also much more meticulous than in high school. While I previously only needed to design a program that would pass a given set of test cases, here I had to be much more particular and adhere to a stricter set of style guidelines and learn to thoroughly test my code myself.
CPSG100 surprised me in a number of ways. I expected the greater portion of the semester to be focused on the nature of global warming and how it can be addressed. Rather, it was largely about the nature of scientific thinking and the nature of pseudoscience. I found the latter of those two much more interesting than I had expected. I enjoyed learning about the plethora of ways people can be misled, often by themselves, and how bad actors can exploit basic human appeals to spread false narratives. I also think I really benefitted from the "Opportunities on Campus" colloquium. It was very interesting to hear the variety of perspectives from the older students on how to make use of the opportunities on campus and on how to best prepare myself for finding internships in the future. The out of classroom activities were much more interesting than I imagined. Though I wasn't aware of it prior to joining the program, I liked service day and enjoyed helping the people at the preserve clean the ponds.
In high school, I didn't quite understand how difficult it would be to make friends here. In high school, classes are much smaller and meet much more often, so you're spending more time with the same people more often, and friendships often form naturally. However, in college this isn't really the case. Lectures are much larger, so it's much more difficult to get to know someone personally, and discussions often only meet once or twice a week making it difficult to meet someone through those as well. To combat this I've tried joining clubs but friendships just don't come as naturally here as they did in high school. Surprisingly, I've also had a harder time managing my schedule than I expected. Not having a concrete block of time to have lunch or dinner has made me much more willing to put it off in favor of finishing another task which can often result in lunch being closer to dinner than I would like. To combat this, I've been trying to have both meals at a set time, but it's still been harder than expected to adjust to. I've also had much more free time than I expected. Initially, I thought my classes would be dense enough to the point where I'd have to spend a significant amount of time studying to maintain a good average but so far being attentive in lecture and discussion has been enough for me to keep up with all my classes while only spending a small amount of time reviewing before each test. I've been trying to find ways to spend this gained time by joining clubs or working on personal projects, but I still need to learn how to properly apply myself to make the best use of it. If I could give future SGC students advice, it would be to go to events and join clubs, even if you feel unsure. Friends can be difficult to make here so trying to be as active as possible in the community can help you build a network of people you can rely on.
Overall, college life differed from my expectations in a variety of ways though is still enjoyable and interesting. It has encouraged me to become more independent, more social, and more organized as I learn to navigate both my academics and my everyday life.