This assignment is to summarize your experience in SGC so far. It must hit all the points listed below, but feel free to express this in your own style. After all, it is YOUR experience you are writing about!
Your report must be an essay written as an HTML webpage, linked to your main page, of at least 500 words length (longer if necessary; do not obsess over word count). Please respond to the prompts below. If you wish to add additional material, however, go ahead.
If you type this up in MS Word or other word processor first, be careful to use only straight (not curly) apostrophes and quotation marks.
Make certain to link this page to your portfolio (as an item under "SGC Gallery and On-Line Projects"). And please: make sure you apply your own css to the webpage.
The Topic: As you finish up your first semester at the University (and in SGC), it is a time to reflect on the difference between what you expected this to be like and how this experience actually played out. In what ways was life as a college student different than you expected? Specifically address:
The Essay: The structure of my university classes are all over the place, some classes are structured well and you can see time was put into the planning to give ample and considerate time to students to accomplish what the professor set out for us to accomplish. In some other classes of mine the timeline of the course seemed to be a bit rushed since assignments would seem to come right after the other or even ahead of schedule. I imagined my university courses to be pretty well planned out and well organized for the most part. I guess some of my classes met that expectation. I honestly don’t know what I expected for the delivery of my courses. But in hindsight the delivery of my courses didn’t fall too short of my expectations. For each course in which I had a lecture it went the way I expected. I sat in a room and the professor taught the class. Now of course some classes were more dynamic. For example my HLTH264class was more interactive than I thought it would initially be. In comparison to my Math113 class which was pretty frank and straightforward. The required grading items that I had for this semester were not necessarily too difficult to complete. I think the workload however was a lot to handle, but it was still what I expected from university courses. We covered things in class that I did not expect such as: the definition and history of science, the formation of certain rocks, and html coding. I kind of expected the course this semester to go into detail about the effect of climate change on the polar ice caps and how the melting of the polar ice caps could have horrible consequences. ButI’m hoping we’ll dive into that topic some other time into the course. I expected the out of classroom activities to of course be engaging and educational. Those two expectations were certainly met by the outside of classroom activities. However, I didn’t not expect to have as much fun as I did on the field trip that we took. I also did not expect to have the degree of freedom and autonomy that I was given on the field trips. I guess this is becauseI’m just coming out of highschool where we wouldn;t have been given that much freedom on a trip. Life on campus is certainly interesting. In some ways I was surprised by life on campus and in other ways I was not. A few things that surprised me living at Centreville was that my floor didn’t have a lounge. So in order to do work or make new social connections I would have to go to various other floors that did have lounges. I guess that because we don’t have a lounge not everyone on my floor is particularly close or knows one another. Which I have to admit I did not expect. I was not surprised however by the degree of freedom I’ve had since moving in. Everyone always talks about how that freedom is both a blessing and a curse when you first start going to college. So I tried to prepare myself for that as much as I could. One of the biggest pieces of advice I would give to an incoming SGC freshman is to not let the freedom of college go to your head. Try to remind yourself why you came to college to help you stay focused, but of course make sure to blow off steam once in a while.