Michael Jeon's "Expectations vs. Reality" Reflection Essay

Going into college I expected to have to spend a lot of money on textbooks and a very difficult workload. I expected a lot more from University classes as well since we are paying for these classes, so I felt as though all the work we would be doing would be important. Even if the work was difficult, at least it wouldn’t be busy work. After experiencing my first semester in college I realized that these expectations were not the case. A good thing was that I didn’t spend much on textbooks because you can pirate them online (sue me I dare you). I was disappointed however in the fact that a lot of college, at least the general education courses, are a lot of busy work. English for example felt very much like english in high school where I got a decent grade by halfassing a bunch of essays on topics I didn’t care about. The worst part about it was it was a required class that I had to pay for. Other than classes like this, other classes are pretty much what you expect. They are challenging, and you have to manage your time well. Grading in general is also much more rigorous, especially for STEM classes. One thing that I didn’t expect was the amount of homework we would have. I felt like college would be mostly exams and classwork, however there is a lot of homework to be done. The homework is also disappointing because I feel as though it isn’t super helpful to learn material, and a lot of the assignments we would get would be so off track in what we learned in lecture making it super difficult to do. Some classes like math use certain programs such as WebAssign, which is so awful in how you have to input answers and doesn’t even give you the correct answer when you get a problem wrong so you can’t learn what you did wrong. In terms of the SCG, we didn’t do as much learning about climate change as I thought we would. Obviously the readings and some lectures were very much related to climate change, but we also did a lot of material on the skills of critical thinking, skepticism, being scientific, etc. I didn’t expect certain lessons such as the lecture on fallacies in arguments, but these lessons felt useful as they are very applicable to our lives. I didn’t really know what to expect outside the classroom activities, but some were enjoyable such as the trips to D.C. and the museums. These were very relaxed and were one of the more enjoyable parts of the course. However, one activity that wasn’t was service day for obvious reasons. Overall, the activities outside the classroom reminded me of field trips we would take in elementary/middle school and were a nice break from the norm. I did wish that the trips weren’t on weekends though because we had to wake up early for some of these activities. In terms of living on campus, dorm life was pretty much what I expected, not preferable at all. Personally, I need my own bathroom because others are so dirty, and I don’t understand how so much hair can be left behind in the shower when it should all wash down the drain. All I can say is that dorm bathrooms have more hair on them than a gorilla. University life as a whole is much more enjoyable than high school life. It’s like being in a mini city where you see your friends all the time and can hang out, eat with, or study with whenever. In general, University life is kind of what I dreamed it would be like when I was in high school. The food is okay I guess, but I can’t complain much. Overall, it is more stressful but it is definitely better than high school, especially with all of the events, clubs, and other activities throughout campus. Finding a good community of people is also very easy in college. One thing that should be taken advantage of is how easy it is to meet people. As you get older I feel like it is more of a challenge to find a community especially as an adult. In college, there is literally no way you don’t fit in in at least one community no matter how weird you may be. Some advice I would give to future SGC students would be to not procrastinate on work for other classes as it really is hard to come back from. No matter how smart you think you are, or how fast you think you can do an assignment, if you procrastinate too much you will regret it. Besides you want time to enjoy other aspects of campus life since it isn’t all work.

Last modified: 10 December 2022