I remember the largest adjustment I had to make to being in college, mostly in the first week, was that the teachers wouldn't remind us of any assignments we had to complete. Instead, we were instructed to refer to the syllabus, one that was always subject to change. I found this immensely difficult, as I had been used to teachers who would often remind their students of due dates and upcoming tasks. I knew that college was going to require us to be more independent, but I didn't expect it to be to his degree. I sort of hyperbolically thought that there were only going to be about three grades for every class, and those grades would only consist of major exams. There are a lot fewer assignments compared to high school, and some classes do just consist of essentially major assignments, but depending on the class, the assignments could be more tedious or challenging than before. I also thought that in college, I would have a lot of free time to do whatever I wanted but found that a lot of time is consumed by work, so much so that many students skip meals in favor of doing their assignments. There is also the stressful factor that is predominant in college, although some high school teachers also shared this behavior, of not knowing what your grade will be until towards the end of the semester. This is either because assignments are graded so late or because finals can overwhelm entire grades. Really, I didn't have many strong or concrete expectations about college before coming into it, but the few notions I had about college were more or less similar enough to what college is actually like. I can say, though, that the difference between high school and university was not as stark and clear as I thought it was going to be. Meaning, I thought that college would incite some different things within me, which it did to a degree, but not nearly as much as I expected.
As for CPSG100, I assumed that anything we learned was going to be a reteaching of or expansion of everything I had learned in high school through my environmental science and zoology classes. This was a pretty accurate assessment, except that through the reading materials, I got a lot of context and history for how certain ecological or geological discoveries were made. Somethings I didn't expect to learn, which ended up sticking with me the most, were logical reasoning and fallacies. I think that was my biggest takeaway from the class, and I was really interested in seeing if I could hear people committing these crimes of logic elsewhere. Something we haven't learned (as of yet!) that I was expecting to learn was a deep dive into evolution. I don't know if it was reasonable of me to believe that this was something that we would examine closely, but I, nonetheless, believed that we would learn about how some specific climates or circumstances forced species to evolve. The outside-of-classroom activities are pretty similar to what I thought they were going to be like but with a lot more museum trips. In high school, I was involved in Science National Honor Society, where we did a lot of outdoor projects, community service, got down in the dirt, and worked with out hands, so when I saw that we were going to start off the school year with service day, I had a pretty good idea of what it would entail. I've always enjoyed these kinds of activities, so I did think that there were going to be a lot more community-service type activities in the program.
I dorm in Centreville, which I think is a very convenient building with close proximity to many of the buildings I have to walk to for class. My experience has been a lot less dramatic and much more normal than I thought it was going to be. Initially I thought that the transition to adulthood, in a sense, would be felt very clearly, especially with no longer being in the presence of my family and parents. Yet, I found the shift to being fully responsible for myself less unnerving than I thought it was going to be. I also stayed very close in touch with my family, whereas before I thought that it would be difficult to stay in touch with them.
Future SGC students should consider how committed they're going to be to the program, because despite the course being relatively chill, it is still a course with weekly work. So, if students are looking to be a part of SGC because they want to be a "Scholar", I would advise them against it, because work is work. One of the things that I found hardest at the university was falling sick, it was incredibly difficult to get better, find medicines, or access doctors speedily. My advice to any student entering campus would be to make sure you know what your resources are and how to access them, campus sicknesses go around all the time. My list bit of advice to incoming SGC students would be something that everyone says and always has: time management is key. It is so easy to get backed up in work and have piles of assignments waiting for you, so it is important to stay on top of it. While time management is important, so is taking breaks, so having days off or days where you can do little work are important to factor into your schedule as well.