In high school it felt as though everyone within the same class had generally the same scope of knowledge. Rather than the difficulty of courses or the strategies necessary for study, this is one of the most startling differences in my mind between high school and university atmospheres. Depending on the class, you could be sitting in lecture next to someone who is a senior while you are simply a freshman. This was a realization I had with my 200 level history courses I took this spring semester(as a freshman). Additionally, I have seen how in low-level courses you find a group of students with diverse amounts of background knowledge/preparation. In my CMSC131 and 132 courses I breezed through assignments and felt little need to even go to many of the lectures since I had significant experience already, but I still saw lots of valid questions being posted for TAs and the professor which gave me good insight into projects, though I never would have thought to ask since I was not particularly struggling with related points. So overall I think it is really important for incoming students to try and put aside any pre-conceived notions about how they think their classes will look like because there is a variety of people and setups in every course and things may not be as one would expect coming from a largely monotonous high school class setting.

  For me, pursuing good relationships with professors has not been particularly on my radar--though I wish it had been. I have still yet to go to any office hours for any course, which I believe has been a mistake. While I have never had particular issues I needed clearing up on for assignments, I think visiting office hours to get clarification or have a professor check if my assignments were on the right/best track may have been helpful in boosting the quality of my work, even if it were just a bit. Additionally, many of my professors have said that they would enjoy people just visiting them during office hours if only just to say hello, if it was not a busy day. I know that cultivating these relationships provides valuable connections and perhaps guidance that I could have used or may be important in my future. The extent of my developing these relationships has been talking with my professors before class, since I always try to arrive at least ten minutes early. This would be one way I recommend incoming students pursue these relationships, since it shows a respect for the class as well as being a good time that you can just ask about one's day and the professor is never often busy just before starting class aside from pulling up lecture slides and whatnot. Other than that going to office hours is definitely important, not just to cultivate relationships but also to clarify and improve one's work.

  Having made many new friendships I can say that it is definitely important for adjusting to university life. You can connect with new people, often from different backgrounds, who are all facing the same changes and difficulties--to an extent--that you are. Struggling with the same struggles together also then creates a closer bond with these new people. I have noticed that, while I miss my friends from back home very much, I have become just as close practically with my group of friends here at UMD as I was with my friends from high school and earlier, and this being after less than a year knowing these new people. What does make finding these new groups difficult is that people generally have less free time than they had in high school, and so you have to work at maintaining these friendships. A lot of people I have met at school have been through classes, but the difficulty is getting to that point where you hang out outside of class, which is difficult since you both have plenty of work, as well as other activities, and other friends. Most of the friends I have gotten close with at UMD have been those that live in the same building as me, because even when we are busy with work we are really close to each other so we can just meet up in a study area within our building and hang out while we do our work or study.

  What I would say I was least prepared for with university academic life is the difference in pace. In my high school we went to the same seven classes every day; this is much different from the five or six classes I take with each being two or three times--sometimes only one, like SGC--a week. But the class amounts is not the big difference that really shocked me--I had worked with similar schedules before--it was moreso the ratio of amount of work assigned and time to do them. High school tends to focus on more short term assignments, easy but with only one day to do them, and a couple scattered long-term assignments. In university academics, there is a larger tendency towards sequences of long-term assignments with a week or two (if not longer) to complete them, often paired with a semester or half-semester long assignment/project. This made planning when I was going to get my work done an integral part of academic life for me. I often struggled with procrastination when faced with long deadlines. This then contributed to a lot of work piling up and a lot of stress during these times of build-up.