After 4 short months, my first semester as a college student is quickly coming to an end. Being an online student during a pandemic definitely made my experience a bit odd, but overall my experience at the University of Maryland was amazing!
Before college, I was scared of what the difference between high school and college would be, especially with the difficulty for classes, social scene, and learning a new environment. Also, I was worried about how much the pandemic would change the college life like if I was going to be able to attend in-person classes, if I was going to be on campus or not, and how much more difficult the courses could be due to them being virtual. To a high schooler, college comes off as very intimidating due to the large number of people there, all the possible opportunities, and the amount of work students do for each class.
Now that I have gotten to experience college life for the last few months, I can gladly say that the pandemic did not take away any of the fun. I was able to stay on campus, make a close group of friends, and attend a lab in-person. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to attend lectures in person as well. Online lectures, especially asynchronous, were much more difficult than I thought. For my asynchronous classes, I struggled way more with how to manage their workload which got pretty overwhelming. The majority of the work that I have done this semester was for my asynchronous classes. I prefer synchronous much more now because it is well organized and provides me the opportunity to meet my professors and fellow students. One of the two synchronous classes that I took was my scholars program course CPSG100. The class met once a week for about an hour. I expected college classes to be organized like this compared to my chemistry lecture where the professor used multiple different platforms. However, I did not expect the Scholar’s colloquium to be as fun and intriguing. This was definitely one of my favorite classes. The grading system was not expected. I did not think that they would break down many of the assignments by percentage for the grade-book. However, I do like how I am able to know how much certain assignments can affect my grade. The information learned from this scholars class was pretty expected except for the large amount of time focused on pseudoscience. Before this class I never even heard of the term. The activities that we did outside of class were way more fun than I thought. Due to covid, I assumed that we wouldn’t do much like the camping trip. Although it did not happen, students were able to do the excursion to the zoo if they chose to. Also, I am glad that students got to do a service for their community and attend modules that would better them mentally and educationally. .
My high school vision of college life was spot on. I thought that college would be very hands-on, busy, and fast paced. However, I did not anticipate how crazy the social life would be. My assumption made from last summer was that covid would cause the social scene to be very boring. However, it was quite fun although I made friends with people who I had to recognize by every other feature besides their face. It was kind of odd how I could not tell who was who unless I heard their voice or recognized their mask. I’m glad UMD was able to handle the covid situation so well and keep the numbers low.
Overall, I had a pretty good and successful first semester as a college student in a Scholars program. I’m looking forward to next semester and what the program has to offer. For future Science and Global Change Students, I advise them to work on maintaining a schedule and getting used to it earlier than later. Having a schedule during a time where many classes are asynchronous definitely helps motivate you into getting out of bed and being more productive with your day.