Divyansh's Freshman Time Capsule Essay

My first year in college
Freshman year for me is almost over. I'm currently writing this as I have my linear algebra final tomorrow afternoon. It's about 1 p.m. in the McKeldin reading room, and I’m already so far behind on studying. I went to sleep at 2 a.m. last night and woke up around 9:30 a.m. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been meticulously planning my sleep schedule so I get at least 6 hours of sleep (hopefully). I’ve had one or two midterms ever since my spring break Poconos trip, which stinks, but it's all part of university life. My parents and older friends weren't kidding; university is a grind. If you're not doing work, you're hanging out with your friends or participating in some other activity. You're never bored sitting in bed rotting; there's always something to do at university. The classes are so much more in-depth and harder. My AP classes in high school would take a whole year to teach us about a subject, but in university, the same stuff is taught in about half the time, which stinks. One class that I didn’t think would be this hard was linear algebra. The name throws it off so much, and the first month or so was very easy. As theories got more theoretical and more theorems were applied, linear algebra became a huge mess of vectors, eigenvectors, nulls, columns, etc. I’m so mad because I did horrible on the last exam when I studied so much for it. My other friend, Alex, is really good at the subject because he took it in high school. I’ve got to study a lot for it, but looking at the third exam, most of the stuff was silly mistakes, such as computing errors. I understand most of the concepts (in my opinion), so I feel 60% good for the final if I had to take it right now. I just have to learn to go slower and take my time, but also not get stuck on one part of one question because that's what I did on the second exam. For future students, as you get past the first month of linear algebra, keep reviewing those same basics you learned because if you don't, it will come back to haunt you. The course that came as a surprise to me was CMSC131, the intro to programming class. I don’t know why, but I sucked at that class. I understand the coding question, but doing the multiple choice is so hard for me. I used to think I hated computer science, but object-oriented programming is something that amazes me because of how creative you can be with it. This summer, I’m planning to create a robot in the Java language using the skills I learned in the intro class. I would recommend this course to any incoming student to see how they would fare in the technical world, and it’s a very good introduction to computer science. Though, make sure you start early on each project in order to have enough release tokens! I wish I had stronger relationships with faculty members, but it's kind of hard to develop sometimes because you only have a lot of professors for one semester. I think I have a good relationship with Dr. Merck because I’ll have him for three consecutive semesters soon, he knows my name, and I also asked him to write a recommendation letter for me! My success in developing this relationship happened on the first field trip SGC did at the farm, plucking weeds. Me and Dr. Merck did a lot of things side by side that day and simply talked about simple stuff. To pursue such relationships, imagine your professor not as a teacher but as a mentor of knowledge. That person knows so much, so make sure you ask questions and listen. He’s not a high school teacher who is going to impose a bunch of restrictions on you and punish you if you break them, but someone who is very understanding of what position you are in and compassionate, along with being a genius. My relationship with my friends is probably what keeps me from burning out. They make me laugh, giggle, be angry, etc., but I know in the summer I’m going to miss them all. I’m going to miss that I can walk into the dining hall and see 300 students all my age going through the same struggle but still pushing through. My relationship with my friends keeps my work in check too because they're all super smart. The greatest obstacle to finding good friends is weeding out the bad ones. You won’t know they are bad when you first notice them, but over time, you realize what type of person they are. Most people end up sticking to these surface-level and toxic relationships, but cutting them off is the best thing to do. College is a stressful place; there's no space for useless and toxic relationships that you don't really want. To make the most of your peers, make sure you befriend people who are smarter than you so you can be uplifted by the rest of the group. Definitely the hardest part of college is work, but make sure you do work on time. I recommend that if you skip lectures, do all the lecture content the same day; it will save you a lot of stress and work down the line.

Last modified: 10 May 2024