Most of my classes have been completely virtual with the exception of my chem lab which was a hybrid class where I had in person labs and online labs alternating weekly. Any class of mine would "meet" between one and three times a week with the tendency for that to be on the lower end being one or two meeting times (classes) per week for my schedule. Three of my classes, CPSG100, AAST398D, and CHEM132, were the classes in my schedule that only had one class time per week. These classes were designated for live lectures or labs. My bio class, BSCI160, met twice per week. These classes were not designated specifically for lecture, although some material was taught, but mainly to ask the professor questions about pre-recorded lectures which students are expected to have watched ahead of time. My other two classes, LARC151 and CHEM131, meet three times a week. In LARC151, I had two classes of the week dedicated to live lecture, and the other class would be the same day as one of the lectures, for me it was Monday, for lab. In CHEM131, there were three classes per week basically for lectures and also to ask the professor questions about topics we have learned or were learning about. In my case however, I was in the asynchronous section, so I had the option to watch my professor's lectures on my own time. Overall, none of my classes gave an overwhelming amount of graded work, but there were some weeks that did feel pretty hectic.
In SGC, I did not expect to be covering the topic of logical fallacies. This topic was really interesting because I had gone over stuff relating to this in my government class in high school and it's always good to know how to have valid arguments, used wisely, by avoiding these fallacies. Instead, I thought this course was going to be completely science focused, and more specifically on climate change, which we did do, however we were not restricted to only learning about climate change, which was nice. Something we have not yet explored, but I expect to in the future, is more of the nitty-gritty science stuff, and how climate change could affect us humans in the future if we make no change to the way we are living right now. It may be scary to think of, but I find it super interesting how bad things could get for us (future generations) if action is not taken. It's also a big motivator if anything to make some life changes when we know we are doomed. I was looking forward to “outside-of-classroom” activities, but unfortunately due to the virus, we were unable to set up any large-scale outside of classroom activities with all of the SGC students. Hopefully next year in the Fall though.
I lived on campus in Centreville from the start of the school year until Thanksgiving break, and I plan on moving back in come next semester. It was not at all what I thought college life to be like as I envisioned it back in high school. Firstly, I didn't even think I was going to be living on campus until I started applying to colleges, especially once covid came around. After putting some thought into it though, I believed that that would be the best option for me to come to campus into order to stay focused on my school work because being here at home, anything I do can be a challenge to stay focused on when I'm asked to do multiple things at once. In terms of expectations, I didn't expect to be partying at all, one, because of the virus, and two, I usually don't party like that unless it's with my family. I also didn't expect it to be boring though, which it leaned more towards rather than the opposite end of the spectrum which would be like nightly partying, or even fun, legal activities outside of my dorm. My days consisted of waking up usually well before my first class since my earliest scheduled class was at 11:00 A.M., working out sometimes, going to the diner for food, doing homework, joining one or two Zooms if I had any that day, and end the day doing more homework and facetiming my friends/family. It was a consistently inconsistent mix of these activities, day in and day out. I did hang out with a couple of my friends from high school more often during the start of the school year, but that became less and less frequent as we got busy with classes, so I really only went out to get food, and I would go home every weekend to wash my clothes and spend the weekend there, so I never missed my family too much since I still saw them every week.
If I could only give one piece of advice to future SGC students, or just future incoming college students in general, it would be to spend your "free time" wisely. When you create your schedule for the first time, depending on how many classes you take, or even if you take seven classes like I did my first semester, you'll probably have way more time outside of school/class than what you're used to. Before you would go to school from around 7:00 A.M. until around 3:00 P.M., and do homework for usually only a few hours after school. Now that you're in college though, you could very likely have one class at 10:00 A.M. and another class at 3:00 P.M. and that's it for your class time for the day. All the hours before, in between, after, under, and over those classes though, you HAVE to be setting out time to portion out your homework, projects, and studying, because once you get behind, it's hard to catch up and those two classes which maybe felt like a breeze before is going to start to feel like you have no time to attend them, and that's never a good idea to skip a class without any unforeseen circumstances.