One thing that definitely stands out to me when I consider what I thought college was like versus what it was, was definitely how personal classes felt. In high school, I had been put under the impression that college classes, intro-level lectures, in particular, consisted of sitting in a huge lecture hall while being talked at and taking notes. While it is true that lectures are very large, I did not realize that they also had discussion sections that allowed you to reinforce the material in a more personal environment. Even if I did not get to know my professor as well as I would have gotten to know a high school teacher, I was able to still get to know the TAs that ran my discussion sections at a good level.
The other thing that most differed from my expectations was the workload. Prior to beginning classes, I had heard constant stories of people finding high school easy before then crashing and burning in college; because I had found a lot of success in high school I thought I was doomed to follow a similar path. This was exacerbated by me reading a deluge of online posts written by bereaved engineering students griping about the soul-crushing workload they struggled under. While the workload is certainly considerable, it is not near the level that I had imagined in my head. I came to the realization that it really wasn’t so bad, and the success I had in high school gave me the study skills I needed to still have success in college.
As for CPSG 100, I didn’t expect that we’d cover pseudoscience and logical fallacies, which is a topic I am personally very interested in and was very pleasantly surprised that we covered it in class. I have always found the bizarre theories conspiracy theorists come up with funny, sad, and fascinating in equal measure, and it was nice to explore the topic further in class. There is nothing in particular that I thought we would cover that we did not, which is probably due to me not having that much of an idea of what would be taught in CPSG 100 prior to the class.
The outside-of-class activities were about what I expected, the museum trips and aquatic garden cleanup lined up well with what I had in mind for the course. But just because they were expected did not make them any less enjoyable. The D.C scavenger hunt was fun, I tend to really enjoy museums, and have used the metro quite a bit. So while I didn’t get much out of the metro part of the activity I still had fun going through the museums.
If I could recommend anything to new SGC students it would be to do as much of your work at one time as possible so that you can then have entire days to enjoy what college has to offer. I tended to do my work slowly with lots of breaks, I would always get it in on time but it meant that instead of doing a project in two or three days I’d let it drag out for a whole week which meant my free time was much less condensed. There’s not a lot of fun to be had in short one or two-hour breaks, and I’d have rather knocked it all out early so that I could participate in clubs or have fun on the weekends.
Overall, I had a pretty decent time this semester, and I think next semester will be a lot better now that I have a handle on my capabilities and time management.