Overall, my freshman year at UMD differed greatly from what I expected, mostly due to the COVID-19 pandemic and being a commuter student. For most of my classes (excluding CPSG100, the first Science and Global Change Colloquium), the classes did not require a lot of work on the day to day, but there were days where there were big assignments or exams due. I expected college classes to be very similar to my high school class, just not happening as many times a week as high school, and I also expected to have a lot of free time to hang out with friends, go to fun events on campus, and go to office hours to get to know my professors and TAs. When I decided to live at home and commute to my one in person class, I had to reset a lot of those expectations, so at the start of the semester, I expected to only go to campus once a week for my class, meet and make friends mostly online, and get really good at managing my time and distractions at home. I would say that my adjusted expectations were mostly accurate except that it was a lot more difficult for me to make friends in my classes online, and I'm still not as good as I want to be at being focused and organized at home. For the structure of my classes, I expected that attendance was always going to be required and taken for every class and that group projects would be difficult online. Because a majority of my classes were online, lectures mostly asynchronous or recorded synchronous lectures, so attendance at most of my classes was not mandatory except for my classes that only met once a week in which case attendance was mandatory. As far as the group projects were concerned this semester, in Zoom breakout rooms where we would do mini group activities, they were a mixed bag; in some of my classes, people eventually stopped speaking in the breakout rooms at all if there was nothing to turn in related to what we were supposed to be doing. I did have a major group project this semester in my communications class that went really well! All my group members were really nice and did all their work which was definitely a nice contrast to my group projects in high school. For grading in my classes, I expected my grade to be based on a lot of little assignments along with a couple of big assignments or exams which turned out to be accurate for the classes I had this semester, but I know that for some classes this is not true, and your grades are based on only a couple big assignments. Something else I expected this year would be that for exams and quizzes, most of my professors would use lock down browsers and have the assessments be closed-notes, but for most of my quizzes and even all of my exams were open-note. I think most of the differences between my expectations and realties occurred because of changes made because of the COVID-19 pandemic, so I am excited for when it is over to check my expectations against a more authentic UMD experience.
My experience with CPSG100 was one my funniest and least-stressful classes this semester! Some of the things that we talked about that I didn't expect were the definition of science unit, the logical fallacies unit, the HTML and CSS unit, and the effect on climate events on past human history. I had done HTML and CSS as part of a class in high school and I didn't think I would get another chance to use it again, so it was unexpected to have to use it as part of a class I thought was going to be all about climate change. I expected that this class would mostly be focused on the science of climate change and the mechanisms that cause it, but I do think that taking that step back of learning what science is gave me a better understanding of the requirements for ideas and theories to be scientific versus pseudoscientific. Some of my favorite parts of this class were the out-of-classroom activities. I had heard that the day after you move on to campus, you go on an all-day trip to a park to clean weeds from a lake for the Scholars Serve event which I was disappointed didn't get to happen this year, but I did get the opportunity to do a really cool online volunteering opportunity that did end up relating to the effects of climate change. For a different activity, I went to a Wellness Workshop from the UMD counseling department for procrastination which I would highly recommend where I learned what led to my procrastination and strategies to eventually have it become easier to start assignments. Although this semester provided a lot of challenges, my Scholars class was a bright spot in my schedule I really looked forward to and thought was really interesting.
Some advice I have for future SGC scholars would be to work out and stick to a balanced work schedule and don't take in-person activities for granite. I cannot express how important the skill of scheduling when you are going to do work and doing work at the time is for college since procrastinating and doing things last minute rarely actually works. Having my first semester at a huge university where I didn't know anyone was extremely challenging in terms of getting to know classmates, professors, and friends that would have been really easy to do in normal in-person class by sitting next to, going to office hours with a classmate to ask a question, or just starting a conversation with someone you want to know, so make sure to take advantage of opportunities to talk to and hang out with your classmates in person since everyone is looking to make friends in college.
