As college was something I have prepared for close to my entire life, I spent a lot of time beforehand anticipating what things would be like when I finally made it. I spent a lot of time considering the University of Maryland before deciding to attend, majoring in one of their new majors: Social Data Science. My first semester of college was eventful, leading me to learn so many things about campus, my major, and myself. For starters, I applied to college thinking that I would be studying psychology. After taking up a year-long internship at a psychotherapy practice, I decided that therapy was not the field for me, and gravitated toward a programming-based study of social sciences. Therefore, the nature of my classes was very different from that of high school, and from what I expected. In high school, every day was the same in terms of classes and schedule, and I was taking the same classes as generally everyone else. From Monday to Friday, I was to wake up at 6:30 in the morning, attend five classes, work at my internship, return home and repeat this process. I was frustrated with doing the same thing every day, especially since I was not learning anything that had relation to the social sciences. Therefore, I expected classes in college to be more interesting, and specific to what I was studying. This has been met, as I am currently taking programming and psychology based classes, and enjoying them much more. My scheduling looks different as well, because my current classes do not happen every day at the same time. This leads me to discuss academic freedom. In high school, classes were practically assigned to each student, and there was no freedom to pick times and professors for our classes. Being in college grants that freedom. I am able to research professors before joining their sections, and choose times for my classes that work with my personal schedule. In terms of grading, college courses are drastically different from high school courses. The grading system was determined by my school district, and each teacher had to follow a strict set of rules in terms of assignment weighting and grading. Homework was always 10% of my grade, with all other assignments being 90%. No assignment could be graded less than 50%, and there was no plus or minus added to grades. However, in college, professors and teaching assistants determine their grading systems. There are often class curves, and I often find myself looking at the syllabus of every class to look at the weights assignments and tests have on my grade. My classes are more interesting and have more of an application to the real world. Furthermore, in college, I expected there to be more busy work, such as textbook notes, homework assignments, and small assignments, but instead there are larger projects that take more time to research for and complete. Upon getting into College Park Scholars, I was not sure what to expect, as I was unfamiliar with living learning programs and separate academic programs the university had to offer. I decided to join the Science and Global Change program, because I wanted to explore more about human interaction with the world as well as earth and physical sciences. In CPSG100, we covered many subjects I did not expect, such as HTML coding. I had some experience in HTML from self-teaching, but learning about it through lectures and applying it to my own online portfolio was unexpected as I did not see the correlation between programming and Global Change. We also discussed academic integrity, and archaeology. Outside of class, I expected there to be more hands-on volunteer work, and more environmental explorations compared to our museum-based excursions. However, my experience in Science and Global Change has been very positive so far as I am learning about the correlation between humans and the developing world, as well as things such as astronomy and archaeology. As a university student, I lived with other members of Science and Global Change in Centreville Hall. This was very new to me, as I have never moved away from home. Because I am the oldest of three children, I enjoyed having my own, new space (aside from my roommate). It was also a good experience to live with others who studied the same things as me. Before living on campus, I was very introverted, reluctant and avoidant of meeting new people and spending time with them. However, living on campus has opened me up. I am surrounded by people my age, and it was so much easier to meet new people and make more friends. Because of this, I have met many new people and gained more confidence socially. My high-school vision of college life was centered around academia, and I only pictured myself studying, yet I find that my first semester has helped me grow beyond that. If you are a future student in Science and Global Change, my best advice would be to always take every opportunity to experience things to their full potential, stay on top of assignments and make efforts to meet new people and try new things.