Akshay Subramaniam's "Expectations vs. Reality" Reflection Essay

This assignment is to summarize your experience in SGC so far. It must hit all the points listed below, but feel free to express this in your own style. After all, it is YOUR experience you are writing about!

Your report must be an essay written as an HTML webpage, linked to your main page, of at least 800-1000 words length (longer if necessary; but please do not obsess over word count). Please respond to the prompts below. If you wish to add additional material, however, go ahead.

If you type this up in MS Word or other word processor first, be careful to use only straight (not curly) apostrophes and quotation marks.

Make certain to link this page to your portfolio (as an item under "SGC Gallery and On-Line Projects"). And please: make sure you apply your own css to the webpage.

The Topic:
As you finish up your first semester at the University (and in SGC), it is a time to reflect on the difference between what you expected this to be like and how this experience actually played out. In what ways was life as a college student different than you expected? Specifically address:

Also, please feel free to address how the semester worked in relation to your non-academic life: the difficulties, the benefits, the disappointments, and the unexpected highlights (if any!) of the situation you found yourself in this year.

[A FINAL NOTE: We do recognize the end of the semester is often a time when many high point value projects become due in all your courses, but we really hope that you will put serious thought and reflection into this essay. We (and hopefully you) can use this essay in future years to look back at your time in Scholars to reflect on how that experienced affected your future experiences at the University of Maryland.]

I am not sure what I expected college life to be like when I got accepted into the University of Maryland. My older brother gave me tips on what to do and what not to do, but he went to a different college, Penn State University, and most of his college life was before the Coronavirus pandemic. The main aspect of my life that I expected to change was my living situation. I come from a family in the suburbs. My parents have always taught me to be independent, but a lot of life was still facilitated by them. However, I believe they prepared me well for college. While it was a huge change living without my parents in a dorm hall, I never felt too overwhelmed by the change. My parents have always said that I never get too emotional, and that I handle stress very well. Even when I have a lot on my plate, I have good outlets that help me stay calm and logical. Usually, music is what helps me refocus and evaluate my situation calmly. Living in a dorm turned out to be really fun, though. I made friends with some people from my floor, and while college has a lot more work than high school, it is really liberating and exciting being ten feet away from my friends at all times. Anytime I want, I can go talk to a friend or get food with a friend, rather than getting permission from my parents to go to my friends’ houses as I would’ve back home. Also, I did not expect to become this close with my friends at college so fast. It has only been a few months, but my college friends are already some of my closest friends. However, I wish I joined more clubs at the beginning of the semester. I joined a few, but I do not feel that I am super involved with them. When it comes to classes, most of them are how I expected them to be. My view on college classes while I was in high school was that everyone just went to lectures and listened to the professor go through a slide show, and that most of the work to do was studying for tests. This was the case for most of my classes, such as computer science, statistics, and music. In computer science, every lecture was just listening to the professor go through a slide show. Outside of class, we had coding projects and tests to study for. My statistics class was similar. The professor taught us concepts on the chalkboard, and we had a quiz in discussion every week. In history of popular music, we went through a slide show in lecture. Our homework was studying for tests and writing essays. However, my astronomy, psychology, and scholars class was different. In astronomy, my professor changed the structure to make it flipped classroom. We only met for a lecture once every two weeks and a discussion once a week. Most of the work was done online in modules on Canvas. For that class, we took quizzes, tests, and did projects all online. In psychology, I learned how to get hired. That was a fully online course, and there was no professor. Instead, all of the material was done in modules on Canvas, but I feel that that course was very useful. My scholars class, as I am sure you know, was different from any of my other classes. The assignments were of different formats, and it was the only class where I actually needed to interact with my peers. We did group assignments that I felt brought me closer to my classmates, and the topics we studied were very interesting. Also, the excursions seemed very fun, but I was not able to go on the ones I wanted to due to the space being limited. Specifically, there was a really long waitlist for the New York trip. Going into the scholars class, I expected all of it to be about things like biodiversity, climate change, and more nature related things. I was surprised when we talked about topics like pseudoscience and logical fallacies. I do not believe future science and global change students have anything to worry about. Though college life might seem intimidating at first, it does not take long to get used to. The SGC professors, Dr. Merck and Dr. Holtz are very approachable and helpful, and they make the colloquium very engaging. The main advice that I would give future college students is do not procrastinate, as I am sure most people did in high school. If assignments are spaced out and done well before deadlines, they do not seem too daunting and they will not cause you too much stress. Also, major in something that you are actually interested in, because that will become your life soon enough.

Last modified: 12 December 2021