I absolutely hated my time in high school. The moment I stepped foot into high school as a freshman, all I could think about was how much better and different college was going to be. My high school was tiny, almost an hour away from home, and under constant construction. My classes were somewhat academically rigorous, but they were still incredibly dull and took away any enjoyment or enthusiasm I used to have from learning. The only silver lining I had in my high school experience was the fact that I was in a Global Ecology magnet program which I liked a lot. So why did I think college would be any better? Wouldn’t most people think college would be harder? Well, I thought college would be a lot better because of the quality of education and resources available to students. I thought all my professors would be brilliant sticklers that reluctantly answer your questions but give really good lectures. I expected the workload to be insanely bad, forcing me to spend all week in the library. But I also thought that having access to school buildings or facilities that were actually in good condition and functional would make the workload easier since I could study there and communicate with my peers without having to freeze like I did in high school. I thought everything would be smooth sailing from now on, and that the only thing I needed to spend the next couple years focusing on was school. When I’d finally graduated high school I was so excited to go to college. But it turned out that college didn’t end up being exactly like I thought it would be.
The day I moved in I was faced with the reality that college is not just about getting through academic challenges but also social, bureaucratic, and health challenges. I’d also quickly learned that college wouldn’t be that different from high school in terms of the perpetual construction on campus. There were a lot of different paperwork processes I had to go through, I had to make new friends since I’d lost a lot when college started, and I had to make sure I ate healthy despite the various tempting unhealthy choices the dining hall offered. I’d come to learn that college was not as simple as I thought it would be and that there was definitely not going to be any smooth sailing while I was there. My classes were about as hard as I expected, but to my surprise my professors were a lot more laid back and helpful than I thought they would be. Despite all the challenges, college is still a lot better than high school for me because of how much more engaging and high quality the teaching is. I was also very glad to be a part of a large and diverse student body that has been very welcoming. I was also lucky to be in the Science and Global Change scholars program since it was a lot like the Global Ecology program I was in during high school.
Most of my college classes were challenging, but nothing absurdly difficult like I expected. They were all in a lecture/discussion format, but for the low credit classes there were no discussions. I thought all my classes would have the usual worksheet, homework, and exam graded items with a final exam being a huge portion of the grade. But in actuality there weren’t that many homework or worksheet type grades in most my classes and a majority of the grade comes from the midterms and not the finals. The biggest surprise to me, however, was my lab class. I genuinely did not expect a two-credit class like my lab to be so time consuming and frustrating. I used to think I’d spend all my time studying for calculus, but most of the time I spent working during the week was dedicated to completing my lab reports and getting ready for the next lab for the week. I also did not expect labs in college to last 3 hours, as I thought they would last 2 hours at most. But a class I think I could say I predicted somewhat well in particular is CPSG100. I figured we’d we learning a lot about what science, climate change, and things about how the biosphere has been changing. But I didn’t think we would talk about geological concepts as much as we did and I was expecting more discussion about ecology and environmental science. When I’d heard about the SGC excursions I was excited since I thought it would be just like high school where we’d go on field trips and report what we did in a journal. In CPSG100 we only had to go on one trip out of the multiple planned trips and we could choose which one. Some of the locations were out of the local area, which I didn’t expect. Like I expected we went on these trips to learn something CPSG related and report it in an excursion report.
The biggest thing I’ve learned from my first semester in college is that its important to be persistent and flexible. If I could give future SGC students advice, I would tell them to internalize the importance of persistence in college. Just from my first semester I was faced with so many different types of challenges. And the reality is that encountering all these problems isn’t something that only happens to me, it tends to happen to just about everyone that enters college. There will be times in college where you fail an exam, miss a deadline, lose a friend, be forced to pay a random fee, or get caught up in administrative red tape, but you just have to learn to take the hits, use whatever resources are available to you, and keep moving forward with your life.