The first semester of my University of Maryland College Park experience is coming to an end. It’s almost so surreal how fast it went. There have been so many vivid memories that nothing ever really seems that far apart. I remember the first week and how lost I was sweating trying to find each class to now getting familiar with the whole campus so quickly. The one thing I noted very quickly in most of my classes is the difference between a teacher and professor. I'm not sure why, but I expected the effort put as a high school teacher would be way less than a college professor because the content in college is more difficult but I was indeed very wrong. Once I came to that conclusion, my perspective on my classes changed drastically and my mindset became a lot more disciplined but also a lot more realistic. The nature of my classes are so different from one another but so similar as well. For classes like Enes 102 and Chem 135, the pace of the class was so fast that I had to set aside my own time to be able to watch a lecture video on top of going to the lecture to fully comprehend the subject. In my math course I was able to understand everything during the lecture and I performed pretty well on the exams too. For my English course, I wouldn’t necessarily call it difficult, but the time consumption was through the roof. Paper after paper and project after project it felt never ending. I also took an asynchronous entrepreneurship course (Enes 140) that was extremely light, just a reading and quiz every Sunday with a project at the end of the course. I didn’t really have much expectations going into college because I never really wanted to grow up but the workload did surprise me. I can take some blame for that though because I did decide to take 17 credits my first semester in college. Other than my engineering course (Enes 102) and Chemistry course, I didn't really struggle with the work, my main issue was managing the workload. There wasn’t really a time during the week that I used for leisure, but I saw it as normal and did not question it. I actually still believed that I wasn't doing enough. For this College Park Scholars course, I was truly surprised at some of the things we learned about. Science and Global change topics were expected but what I became most intrigued with waas the logical fallacies. I expected to be learning about how our world was changing and the science behind the earth's natural resources then boom, logical fallacies. They interested me because at first it seemed as if it was just silly terms that highlighted inconsistencies and bias. As we spent more time on it I saw how influenced people are and these terms showed how consistently they make the same mistake. To give that mistake a term shows how common it is. Another thing that caught me off guard was the process of cheating instances. First, I didn’t think I would learn it in this class out of all of them. Secondly, the process was a rude awakening as well. Everybody in college is seen as a grown person and with that, grown people consequences follow. How one cheating instance can lead to a whole trial and all the way to something that's almost permanent on your transcript that can affect your life past college is scary. Something that I expected us to cover by now is photosynthesis. I'm not sure why but whenever I think of the basics of our world, the first thing my mind goes to is the plants. Plants need photosynthesis to live but maybe since the topic has been covered so much in the past and its simplicity, that's the reason we haven’t been over it. The outside classroom activities are more fun than I expected. I met some new people especially on the first mandatory museum trip and I felt comfortable communicating after the field trip as well. This was better than what I expected because I didn't think I would make real connections through the trips but now I realized that college is really about meeting new people and making new connections. Me being a commuter student I realized so many things. At first I was really bummed out because I feel as if I didn't have the full college experience. Seeing people stay out late doing things with their friends and me knowing after my classes I had to go home was a bummer. But later on I realized how much stress just going to school was. I connect experiences with places and the disappointment and stress felt at that campus stuck with me so I wouldn't really know how I would feel if I lived there. Coming home and seeing my mom is a huge relief no matter what I went through that day. Honestly my expectations were that I would be having a little bit more fun and meet a lot more people but I feel fine with my experience now. Some advice I would give to future SGC members is to do your excursion report early! Finals Week with the projects is not a good time to have other work that could've been done earlier lingering around. If you can finish the work whenever you have the knowledge to, not when the deadline comes around. This is a mistake that I'm living with right now and now I know not to repeat this again. At the end of the day, don't stress too much because you will be fine no matter the outcome.