As my first semester ends, I feel as if it is important to reflect upon my experiences and find ways I could’ve improved in living more independently and as a student. To start, I want to look at my classes. In general, the workload in all my courses was more than what I expected with many of them having solely projects which at times made it hard to keep up at times but I somehow managed. I think I could’ve had better time management in regards to my assignments so that is something I will be looking forward to improving in the future. Either way, I think a lot of it comes down to habits I developed in high school where I assume I will be able to complete a lot of my assignments in a certain amount of time and only allot that time for work. This doesn’t really work as well in college where you have less assignments but more time is required on them. Then again, I wished I spent more time in one class than the others since there are times where I solely focus on one class and fall behind in my other classes that can cause stress. Also with the big lecture rooms, it was an adjustment to being in such a large room where I wasn’t always in contact with the professor. I think what I could have done better in regards to my performances in class and my relationships with my professors is to actually take advantage of the office hours since during the semester I rarely used them. I also would have communicated better with any roadblocks I had with assignments.
In regards to my scholars class, CPSG100, it wasn’t at all what I expected since we mainly went over the fundamentals of science before we got into the interesting part of the program which I wanted to see. I would say the interesting parts being ecology, climate change, and evolution is what drew me towards this program but the first class felt a little lackluster since I personally already knew a lot of it from high school, but I understand why we need to go through them because not everyone would have been taught the fundamentals of science. Either way, I’m excited for the future topics we will go through as I am expecting them to be more aligned with what I mentioned earlier. In addition to the in classroom lectures and activities, we had these field trips or out of classroom activities which I actually enjoyed and felt that they complimented the course very well since it was related to our environment. For example, going to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens was really enjoyable for the most part since it was a pretty unique experience for me. It helped me further understand the effects of invasive species and the importance of volunteers working together to help the environment. I wish I could’ve gone on more trips but every single one of them, I ended up sick the day before which was very unfortunate.
Not only were the classes an adjustment, adjusting to my new environment and independence wasn’t so smooth. I decided to dorm on campus in Centreville which is an okay building but a perfect location for my first year. As mentioned before, I ended up sick many times, which also catered to my inability to work at my full capacity, which was again very unfortunate. Pretty sure it was from the different diseases and environments that people were from that catered to that so that was out of my control. I think to midgate it, I should’ve eaten more healthier and maintained a good routine. Dorm life was as much as I expected it to be actually where I don’t generally spend as much time in my dorm as compared to me being out and about with friends or studying in ESJ. I’ve already experienced something like dorm life to some extent throughout summer so I was somewhat more adjusted to it than others.
Some advice to the reader or to any future SGC students reading this. As you can tell, I struggled with my time management with a plethora of factors that were out of my control and in my control. As a student, definitely work to change your habits from high school to college since the academic environments are so different. Balancing out self care time and work time as having more time for work isn’t healthy and having more time goofing off can lead to bad academic performance. I also want to note that professors are there to help you if you end up struggling. On another note, I would advise someone to always say yes to any opportunity given to them. Be active within your community. Apply to everything and accept everything. I’m not saying you should say yes to anything socially, because there would be boardline peer pressure, I’m encouraging you to take any academic opportunities you can take as long as you understand its benefit. Even if you applied and didn’t get accepted, the most important thing is that you tried. Same thing with tests as you shouldn’t be so down about so called failing an exam. Learn from it and move on to become better at the subject. Put a little more effort each time and I guarantee you will do better. Grades don’t always define you, the way you learn does. You can’t change the past anyways so change your future.
To end things off here I would like to thank you for reading, the semester has been wild where I’ve had moments that felt like the world actually ended and moments where it was pure bliss but in general it was rewarding. I’ve learned so much in such a short amount of time which makes me very optimistic for the future. SGC may seem dull at first with all the science stuff, but get through it, be optimistic and most importantly, make the most of your time here at UMD.