My first semester at College Park has been an amazing experience, and I can not wait to continue my education here over the next three years. That being said, there were many hurdles and obstacles to overcome along the way, and in this essay I will go over my whole freshman experience, including surprises, relationship development, and academic life.
Coming into the university I was very set on majoring in electrical engineering, but that quickly changed once I started classes. My first electrical engineering course and CHEM135 were extremely difficult right from the start, and I had also been opened up to another major due to the supporting class requirement of SGC. For one of my supporting classes I took AREC200, which really changed what I wanted to do for my future. My biggest surprise was not one class itself, but the combination of not really enjoying what I was doing, and getting experience in other fields due to scholars. I think that a very important thing as a freshman is to keep an open mind, and broaden the scope of your courses to make sure you have experience in other areas. If you are like me, this could even lead to a major change in something that you never even knew existed.
Developing relationships with faculty is something that you do not often do in high school because you simply do not need to, but in college it is important to have connections with faculty to make the experience easier for you. My greatest success in developing relationships with faculty was through interactions with TAs through labs and study sessions like GSS. In my CHEM132 and PLSC111 lab, I developed a lot of connections with my TAs as labs are smaller groups and you are able to talk to your TA much more. I think it is important to ask a lot of questions and attend study sessions to ensure that you fully understand your classes, and to also make connections with faculty that have very valuable knowledge and experience that you can learn from.
While developing relationships with faculty is important, I believe that it is significantly more important to make strong relationships with other students. I am not a very outgoing person, but scholars enabled me to interact with others through field trips and group projects, allowing me to meet people that I probably never would have met otherwise. I also believe that it is very valuable to meet people before you actually move into College Park, whether that be previous classmates, your room mate, or people you find on social media. Just meeting or knowing one other person before you move in can give you opportunities to meet a lot of other people that you can make great friendships with. It is also crucial to have friends just to get your mind away from school sometimes, and give yourself time to hang out, go eat, or just talk to others.
Even though I think I was pretty well prepared for college life, the one thing that I wish I would have done better was the room mate search process. Looking back there are multiple important things that I did not think about when choosing my room mate, and they are things that you should make sure you account for. The two biggest things for me were temperature control and bedtime hours. I like my room much colder than my room mate, and most of the time our room ends up being too hot for me or too cold from him. I think a lot of that is due to where we are from, but it is something that I wish I had thought about. Another thing that we are not very similar on is bedtime hours. I usually stay up until at least 12 each night while my roommate is usually in bed by 10. It is not great because I have to try to be very quiet at night and he has to try to be very quiet in the mornings, and I wish I would have asked more about this before we moved in. Other than that, I think I was adequately prepared and brought everything I would need- maybe even too much. However, the experience at UMD has been great overall and I can not wait to continue here next year.