In my first semester at UMD, I grew more than I could have imagined. In my highschool naivety, I thought that college would be around the same difficulty as high school; however, I was wrong. I spent the majority of the semester adapting to the new environment of college with the harder classes and learning to balance my life. Luckily, I made many friends along the way that have pushed me forward in my studies. I have always been relatively carefree in my future and went with flow especially in high school. But being in a new environment in which I am continuously around like-minded individuals trying to learn and progress their careers, I realized that I have more control of my future than I thought and that it is up to me to make the effort to progress my career.
Looking back towards my high school years, I was a good student on paper, but I lacked the environment to push me forward. I was able to get away without studying but in college that is not much of an option. College classes are manageable but require more attention and time. I have especially realized the workload of college during my calculus class. I originally took calculus in high school, but my professor was going through those topics multiple times faster than I learned in high school while teaching additional intricacies of the topics. After going through both college and high school courses, I highly prefer college courses. The organization of the classes was more flexible and structured with some classes being split between discussions and lectures. One of my major difficulties in transitioning to college was the weight of midterms and finals on your overall grade. For a few of my classes the final is forty percent of my grade which has created a lot of pressure on me to study and perform on these exams. I also found that lectures moved at a much faster rate, such as in my urban planning class in which we would cover entire chapters of a topic such as sustainability and garden cities in a single day.
Living on campus has been an interesting experience being away from my parents for the first time. I believe that over the past few months I have become more and more independent resulting in me becoming responsible. College freedom was all I expected and more. I was able to go anywhere I wanted anytime of day and had access to public transport if I wished to go outside of campus. College has made me aware of the importance of the community around you. Especially in environments such as the libraries in which I felt pressured to study hard seeing how everyone around me was working hard.
Moving onto my CPSG100 class, I found the class interesting in the range of topics that the class covered. The class made me question my thought process and psychology through the scientific method along with argumentation and logical fallacies. I came into the class originally thinking that I would learn about methods to stop global warming and the impacts of a single person, but I came out of the class questioning the validity of the information I was seeing and the amount of misinformation in the world around us. What surprised me more in the class was the out of class activities such as service day and the NYC trip. I remember throughout service day, I was not fond of getting my hands dirty, but looking back, it was a fun memory hanging around all these new people working hard to move all the dirt and pulling on the lily pads.
One of the highlights of my fall semester was the NYC trip to the American Museum of Natural History. Being in a city was not exactly what I had in a mind in a class based on science and global change. But, being able to walk through a museum filled with material that I learned in class was interactive learning that I did not know I was missing out on. I was able to see how animals have evolved over millions of years and the physical scale of these large animals such as the titanosaur. I especially enjoyed the free time we had after the museum visit in which we split into groups to explore Times Square. Although I have been to time square multiple times, being there with scholar friends left me with a memorable experience.
In conclusion college was a large step forward, it was everything I wanted and more. Although it came with hardships and harsh reality checks, I believe I am progressing as a student more at UMD than I would anywhere else. High school I did not know what to expect from college in the slightest, all I knew was that it was the next step forward in eventually reaching self-sufficiency. But along the way, I have been exposed to so many different experiences and my want to try new things and continue learning has only grown.