Dearest Gentle Reader,
Today I would like to share with you all my experience during my first semester at the University of Maryland-College Park. More specifically, I will be sharing with you by time in the College Park Scholars Program: Science and Global Change.
In order for you to get a full picture let me take you back a little bit. Well, more a few months. It's about a week before the semester starts and I'm starting to really panic. I'm wondering "Dear God Eni! What have you gotten yourself into. You have never been away from home for more than two weeks at most and now here you are adulting. What if you a break a law...gasp or worse...what if you FAIL A CLASS."
I'm sure you can now picture what I was feeling going into college. I was a nervous wreck. So you can imagine my suprise when I got here: its not as scary as you think. On the contrary in fact, it was thrilling! For the first time in my life I was able to be my own person without feeling constantly critiqued on the smallest things.
I expected for classes to be boring a serious, but it was the opposite. Being in SGC colloqium, has been a blast. Each week I can expect to have a chuckle at least once or twice. It is a class that teaches you about the world around you in such a down-to-earth way (pun intended). We didn't have a plethora of assignments, instead we were graded truly on putting our best foot forward.
Going into that class, I did not expect that I would be leaving, knowing how to right code. Can you imagine the sense of shock I had in my head, when I expected to walk into class and start talking about how to plant more trees or something, but instead I was told that I was going to make a website...from scratch. For a moment, I genuinely thought I had walked into the wrong class, but alas I was right where needed to be and what I would soon find out is where I wanted to be.
Learning how to speak the language of HTML has been quite the experience. There have been challenging moments for sure, but once you figure out what you are doing, it becomes a blast. To top it off, living in Centreville made things so much better. I am surrounded by peers who are in the same program and who are going through the same things I am going through. I gave me a sense of community, that without I'm sure things wouldn't have gone as well for me.
As far as a message for future Scholars, I would say just go with the flow. Now that may sound a bit dull or cliche even, but trust me when I tell you, if you are just yourself and you do the best you can, you will succeed.
I suppose that's all I have for today dearest reader, but thank you for listening. I hope you learned something.
'Til we meet again,
Me