First semester of college has gone well! I did not have many concrete expectations heading in; I had a few people tell me I would enjoy college as compared to high school, but outside of that, I did not have a specific way I expected my college experience to go. There were, of course, a few things I wanted to do, like maintain a decent academic standing, do some fun and meaningful research, stay physically active, and join some new clubs. And so far, I've managed to make progress on most of those goals! All of my expectations regarding college classes were based on my high school classes. In addition, it' s only been one semester, so I don't want to generalize the college class experience, but based on what I've seen, college has confirmed the idea that a higher student to faculty ratio generally means you receive less personalized attention in college than in high school. However, discussions, in my opinion, do a really good job of alleviating this (at least my TA's for this semester are all very good). In addition, as Dr. Holtz makes very clear, the vast majority of professors are not educators, as compared to high school teachers, whose primary job is to provide education. This is another noticeable change as well, and I'm doing a lot more self studying than I did in high school. A general increase in independence is not restricted to just classes. Planning out a schedule and maintaining a positive work life balance is now more under my control than ever. I personally enjoy this independence, and while it' s something I had a vague idea about in high school, I wasn't able to accurately envision and appreciate its benefits. For CPSG100, I expected we'd cover stuff related to climate change. We are doing that now, but we spent a lot more time on psychology than I thought we would, looking at different cognitive traps, like confirmation bias, selection bias, sampling bias, etc. We haven't covered methods of combating climate change, which I thought we would cover, but it's my understanding that this is for later in the scholars program. In terms of workload, my first semester is a bit of an exception because I'm taking a comparatively easier schedule: Math 240 (multivar), CMSC 132 (comp sci course), English, East Asian Civilizations, and Scholars. I'll be switching majors next semester and my courses and workload is going to get a lot worse. But just going off of this semester, my college workload is significantly easier than my high school one, at least for junior and senior year. I'd say my current schedule is more comparable to the schedule I took as a sophomore in high school. Part of this is because I scheduled all of my classes in the morning, so I'm done with classes by lunch, meaning I have a good 8 hours to do whatever I want. I understand not everyone can get up for an 8 or 9 am, it really allows me to make the most out of my day. I've found I just generally have a lot more time and energy than I did in high school. By my estimation, I'm able to be around 1.5 - 2 times more productive per day in college as compared to high school. Related productivity sleep and just maintaining a general routine. I try to sleep at 11 everyday and eat three meals a day, and taking care of myself helps with alertness and not taking 4 hour naps everyday. Speaking of eating, I try not to let myself fall into the trap that the food here is bad. Firstly, because compared to other colleges, the food here is pretty good! !! Secondly, I know if I start telling myself the food is bad, I will start to hate living here. For me, food is important to maintaining a semi decent mental state. Eating different kinds of foods can help with variety and mundaneness. Research was something I knew I wanted to do as soon as possible, for all sorts of reasons. Most importantly, research is interesting! My research my last year of high school is what kept senioritis away. And of course, it can lead to career opportunities and give some academic credit. If you are also interested in research, you should start looking at professors/labs/groups as soon as possible. Ideally, you would start looking over the summer before your freshman year (actually, if you did your college applications diligently, you would have found opportunities already and written about them in your app). I did not do this, I started looking for opportunities second/third week of school, which is still plenty early. Find some work you find genuinely interesting and cold email. Making a cold email template can really help with this. Be diligent about cold emailing, it can take as little as 5 emails and as many as 50, but don't give up! I hope this was somewhat helpful