College is everything that I expected it to be and not to be. My older brother graduated from the University of Maryland just this past Spring, so I kind of got an inside look as to what living on campus might look like. He took me through a day in his life but as he was a kinesiology major, the classes he took and the buildings he visited didn’t really prepare me for my actual schedule this semester. I think my initial expectations were that college was going to be either super easy or super difficult. When I say that, I thought it was going to be super easy or difficult academically, socially, and emotionally. I thought that academics were going to overtake my life and that I wasn’t going to have any time for making friends– which scared me because I’m a really introverted person to start with, so for something else to get in the way of me making new friends frightened me. But honestly, I thought of the worst scenarios before coming into college which at the end of the day pushed me out of my comfort zone because I was going in expecting the worst, but everything turned out great! I feel like I was prepared socially for college because I made new friends pretty easily– even though it was a struggle. I honestly feel like I was 50/50 when being academically prepared for college. My old high school was a smaller school, therefore there was a limited amount of teachers and classes we could actually take. I feel like the closest class that “prepared” me for college was an AP Biology class, because of the workload and tests. I took a Dual Credit English class as well in high school, but for me, it didn’t really prepare me for English101 here. I’m taking around fifteen credits this semester and each of my classes is unique in its own respective way. The teaching style of each class is different and sometimes that can be a good thing or a bad thing— if a teaching style isn’t effective for me, I won’t excel in that class. I think my expectations for classes and workloads before this semester, was that everything was going to be extremely difficult. Although this may be true in some cases, I think the most difficult part, at least for me, was making sure my mindset was good and making sure I didn’t procrastinate. There were things in high school that I took for granted, like study reviews for classes. I don’t know why I was almost expecting the academics to be similar to high school but that definitely wasn’t the case. My classes this semester were as basic as a schedule can get and it definitely still was a struggle making sure I was managing my time well. I do enjoy learning in a couple of my classes because it’s stuff that actually interests me but there are some that I’m just kind of “taking for the credits”, even if that seems a little harsh. As for SGC, I really do enjoy the class! I am interested in the material we are learning and the class is all that better because I have some friends in it as well! I wasn’t expecting to cover some stuff in our lectures like the history of where we got things– with everything we learned I feel like we got a background story to it. CPSG100 reminds me of the astronomy class that I’m taking this semester in the way that it’s structured. We have lectures about once a week in each class and there is an in-class assignment or questions due before class each week! I wasn’t surprised that we had classwork and homework assigned for beginning and end of class because since we were only meeting once a week, I figured that’s were the chunk of our points were coming from. I do enjoy doing them along with the readings but sometimes it can get a little tedious which is time consuming but at the end of the day, we only meet once a week. I live on-campus in Centreville, so I feel like vision of University life was pretty accurate from what I thought in high school. I do enjoy living on campus because I feel more connected to the campus because when I’m doing my everyday tasks I see the same people and we eventually became friends! I feel like it is really easy to make friends in college because we’re all new to the school and campus, basically new to everything, so everyone is kind of trying to find those people that can be their support group. My advice to future SGC students is that they should really focus on finding the perfect balance between academics and social life. When one of those things gets more important than the other, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Finding that balance is key because the two overlap in a lot of places which can be good but also bad when one outweighs the other. Also, I want to emphasize the importance of making a good schedule for YOU and only you! Everyone has their own learning and studying styles which is unique to them and them only so it’s important to make sure your schedule works for you! Making sure that when you aren’t a morning person, don’t schedule classes too early in the morning! I think really taking the time to research the classes your planning on taking and the locations of your classes is important! If you don’t like walking or do like walking, making sure that the classes you signed up for, you can walk to in a reasonable time! I think that’s something that I really focused on and I’m happy that I did!