Overall, my college experience so far has been a mostly positive one. The classes that I took this year other than CPSG100 were CMSC131, MATH461, SOCY105, and INAG110. I only took 14 credits this semester so the course load was fairly manageable. In my communications class, which was INAG110, the structure was very similar to high school. The class size was around 20 people, there were in-class assignments and participation points almost every day in class, and there were major assignments which were speeches that were just like tests. This wasn’t exactly what I was expecting from a college course but it was very similar to the types of classes in high school so I did well in the class. My sociology class, which was SOCY105, was a bit different. The structure was almost entirely lecturing in class, with some assignments to be completed outside of class. Each week there was a participation assignment and throughout the course, there were also 3 major assignments called reading summaries which were like essays for an English class. Instead of a final exam, there is a podcast we must record with other people from the class. This class was a bit more of what I expected from college courses with mostly lecturing and assignments for out-of-class, and the workload wasn’t too bad either. My other two classes were linear algebra (MATH461), and object-oriented programming (CMSC131). These classes were the most like what I had expected college courses to be like. They both were in large lecture halls with over 100 students, and each also had a final exam. They did not really require you to go to the lectures since most of the material was posted online in lecture videos. Most of the graded items in the classes were larger projects. In computer science, the only graded items were the quizzes, exams, and coding projects, which is similar to what I had expected. In math, we had a graded assignment each week as well as four Matlab projects due throughout the semester. We also have exams and a final exam. Again, this is more of what I had expected out of college classes, most of my grades being based on exams and large lecture-based classes. In the CPSG100 class, there were some things that we covered that I was not expecting. Things like the various extinction events that have occurred throughout the history of the earth, as well as things like Vikings and the effects that climate change has had on various civilizations. I enjoyed learning about both of these things and found them very interesting. I did not know about most of the extinction events that had occurred, such as the Ordovician/Silurian mass extinction or the Late Devonian mass extinctions. I did think that we would explore more about what we can do to prevent climate change. Throughout the course, we did not seem to talk much about solutions and how we can help to fix the issue. I think we will talk about that in later sections of the class, however. The out-of-class activities were fairly similar to what I had expected. The day we went to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens for service day was fun and I met some new people that I really liked. Wading into the ponds was a very unique and fun experience and is something I would want to do again. The excursion that I went to was the world premiere of Supercell. It was an interpretive dance to help raise awareness of climate change. Going into the performance, I did not really know what to expect. I had never been to a dance performance and did not have much experience with any kind of dance before. To me, the performance was a bit confusing but I think that I understood the main messages it was trying to get across. This year I lived in Centerville Hall which I think is a pretty good spot to live. University life is almost the same as what I had imagined it to be in high school. The only difference is that I did not really understand what it would be like to walk across such a large campus so frequently, and having to go back and forth between places can get a bit tiring. Overall though, university life has been a good experience and I think living on campus was a good decision for me. Some advice that I would give to future SGC students to help ease them into college life would be to take it slow. When you first get to college there are so many options you have and things to do it can be very overwhelming. You have a lot of time though and don’t need to rush into anything immediately. Take your time to get adjusted and make sure not to put too much on your plate, or you might burn out before your college is over.