My classes were mostly as I expected. It took me a couple weeks to get used to the concept of Lecture vs. Discussion classes, but taken as components, neither of them were new to me. I imagined "Lectures" to be these massive gatherings where hundreds upon hundreds of students cram into a hall, something similar to the auditorium in Iribe; while partly true, there weren't that many people, and lecture hall designs vary. Discussions are similar to a high-school class experience; that’s where worksheets and quizzes are done. I’m not sure if entry-level courses were designed this way specifically to accommodate freshmen (freshpeople?) but I interpret them as checks to make sure we are properly keeping up, and I appreciate it.
Assignments vary by class; some do quizzes + worksheets/labs + projects, some just do quizzes, one does a couple projects and the rest is mostly participation, and – although it doesn’t count as a “class”, per se – Orchestra’s “show up and pay attention”. For my CS and Math courses, anything "small" -- like worksheets and quizzes -- are done in class, so most of the actual take-home (or take-dorm?) work are projects. It seems that we are more trusted to manage time; more on this later. It's not much work, if one knows what they are doing. Difficulty-wise, I guess at most the difficulty of an AP, which checks out.
CPSG100 ran a bit differently from my others. The program is called "Science and Global Change", and as I expected, this course does indeed talk about "Science" and "Global Change". I will say that I didn’t expect to see HTML; it seemed like an arbitrary Computer Science thing stuffed into an otherwise environmental-science course. This is one of my classes – the other being Ethics of AI – that lumps lecture and discussion into one class. In both classes, I notice teachers like to involve students a lot more; over in Scholars, we have the in-class questions, while over in Ethics we often have “turn around and discuss with the person next to you”.
Heading into college, I had no expectations for what life here would look like. I don’t have any siblings older than me, and everyone else I knew who did go, I didn’t talk to much. One thing that stuck out to me was the sheer amount of time on our hands; I have been trained decently well to keep track of time on assignments and do things as quickly as possible, and the courses that do give HW aren’t hard or tedious in a way that would force me to spend time on them.But as a result, I’m left with a lot of time between classes, and at night. (I sleep pretty late, though I guess that’s a natural consequence of having more free will.) I scarcely know when my friends meet up, so I’ve just been filling this time by picking up hobbies. As of time of writing, I have joined one club, though I don’t go to it often.
Finally, a few things for me to tell future students:
That’s all I have for now. If I think of anything else, I’ll update this.