Charlie'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.]

After my first semester of college at UMaryland, I can confidently say that this campus has completely surmounted my expectations. When I first got to college, I did not know what to expect. Between the impact COVID had on my high school experience - shutting school down, online classes, missing out on prom - and the feeling of living far from home, I was not expecting things to go as well as they did. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy it was to make friends here on campus, whether they be from the floor, different classes, or clubs! In short, there are a lot of things to do on campus, and many ways to reach out and connect with new people!

Classes here in college are very different from those in high school, to varying degrees. Most similar to high school are my Calculus (MATH141) and Chemistry (CHEM135) classes. The main class consists of a lecture not unlike a regular high school class, where you sit for an hour and take notes. Exams are just like they were back in high school, with a unit test after every chapter, and quizzes along the way. However, the similarities stop when we get to discussion. Instead of a regular lecture, discussion consists of a small subsection of students from the same class, with a TA who goes over what happened in lecture, with examples and further explanation on confusing topics.

Additionally, I have also taken COMM107, my oral communication requirement. This class exceeded expectations from what I was used to in high school, as while a lot of the class WAS a lecture on how to give speeches, we also got a chance to actually present our own. I spent many classes either watching and critiquing other speakers, or presenting my own speech on topics like logical fallacies, nuclear energy, and procrastination. This class has been great, and I have learned a lot about public speaking.

Furthermore, I have also been given the opportunity to take ENES100, which has been NOTHING like high school. Within the first class, it was obvious this would not be like anything else I had done in school, as we were always put onto group projects, working with teammates, and working hands-on. Halfway through the semester, we began the final project: building an Over-Terrain Vehicle (OTV) designed to navigate to a crash site, complete a mission, then navigate through an obstacle course, all while completely autonomous. This class has been both a blast to be a part of, as well as a pain to get through. There is always something that can go wrong, something to troubleshoot, like a motor failure, or a delayed part. However, I also gained a lot of knowledge, both on the mechanical, electrical, and computer side of robot-building, and also on the teambuilding aspect, having to schedule office-hours together to make effective use of time, and making sure everybody is on the same page with assignments. This class was very different from what I had expected when I first started, and has completely changed my expectations for engineering classes next year.

CPSG100 has completely subverted my expectations from when I first started here at UMD. What I thought was going to be a class on clean energy, pollution, and the environment, has actually challenged a lot of how I think and view the world. The unit near the beginning of class on Kida’s “Don't Believe Everything You Think” generated a great deal of inquiry into how we think about the most simplest of things, and how our minds are very susceptible to mistakes (I found it so interesting, I used it as one of my speech topics!). And while we did eventually get to the climate change half of the curriculum, this class still diverted my expectations, going into the earth’s history of past changes in climate, before delving into our own impact on it as humans. Service Day itself was nothing like I was expecting it, but I am so glad it turned out the way it did, even with the intense heat.

Living in Centerville has been a great experience, unlike anything I have lived through before. My roommate and I have gotten to know each other really well, and have made friends with many others on our floor and through classes. You gain a lot of agency when you come to college, getting to pick which classes you want to take and when, getting together with friends whenever you like, choosing from a myriad of different clubs and organizations, university life has been spectacular so far.

When you are in high school, you are given a set schedule, and one of the things you cannot control is when you have lunch, and who you can sit with. In college however, you have to make plans for lunch with your friends, you have to coordinate classes together, and you have to find when people are free. The best advice I can give to future SGC students is to take advantage of this new-found agency of yours. You get to set your own hours, but you also HAVE to set your own hours, nobody is going to do it for you. So make sure you get out, join anything that sounds fun, be sociable, and have a great time!

Last modified: 13 December 2021