Expectations Essay My first semester at UMD was vastly different than I expected. The biggest thing was that all of my classes were online and I was at home instead of on-campus. Unfortunately,this was unavoidable but it still had a large impact on my experiences during the semester. I was a little disappointed that things were online as I was looking forward to living in a new environment. Especially because I live out of state so it would be a completely fresh start for me, where with classes online I don’t feel incentivized to speak up or participate.With some of my classes, I think it was easier for me to understand and learn when things were online, but it also made it easier for me to get distracted and lose focus while working. For my Computer Science class, the online format did not really affect how I learned the material, but In my math class it was much harder for me to learn things in the online format. It may have just been teacher dependent, but the way that my math teacher translated her class into an online format was not very good and actively inhibited my ability to learn in the class. However, my other classes were for the most part, like my computer science class in that switching to online format did not affect my ability to learn very much. Another thing that I didn’t expect was all of the free time that I have. In high school, I went to a charter school which had longer days than all of the other schools in the area, so I was not used to having so much free time between classes and after them. I knew that I would have more free time in college, but did not expect such a large increase. This leads into my next point about studying and homework. With all of my free time, I knew I was expected to study more, but It was hard for me to focus at home. Back in high school I did most of my homework in study halls and did not have to study very much or at all to get good grades. I’m not used to studying at home which made it very hard for me to adapt to start focusing and actually study and complete my homework instead of wasting time on my computer all day. In CPSG, I did not expect to focus so much on what was causing climate change and not say much about solutions or other things related to climate change. I also expected to talk more about things in other scientific fields that we never referenced. I felt like the website portion of the class was shoved in just to have some diversity from only talking about climate. It also felt like we were given too much hand holding on the website compared to our other activities and reinforced my belief that it was only included in the curriculum to say that they did some computer science. For future students, I would recommend making a routine early in the semester that you follow every day to make sure you don’t forget any classes or assignments. This helped me, especially for some classes which had classes early in the week but assignments at the end of the week. Overall, it made keeping track of what I had to do a lot easier. I would also recommend starting any projects you get early, as due dates for projects are usually similar for all classes and if you wait to start it is hard to do quality work on all of the projects. For computer science in particular, for each project you get 3 test tokens every 24 hours to see if your project passes the tests, so if you start early you have more tokens to use to check your project. For college life, I recommend finding a club to join to help make friends, especially if things are still online only, as they help find people with similar interests and I enjoyed joining the cybersecurity club. There are a lot of opportunities to take advantage of and if you are prepared you can really make a lot out of your time in college, especially if you start early. Looking back on this semester, I definitely should have spent more time taking advantage of these opportunities and I regret not making good habits early in the semester.