One of the courses that surprised me the most that I took this year was INST154. This course is called Apollo at 50, and it teaches you all about the Apollo missions and the history of NASA. This class was extremely interesting to me and surprised me a lot because I didn’t know there were classes like this that just taught you about interesting things and the history behind them. I discovered this course by just looking through the UMD course catalog and searching for some general education courses. In there, there are a ton of interesting classes that go into depth about some fascinating topics. I also heard about this class because one of my friends had taken it the semester before me, and had mentioned he was taking it. That's another great way to learn about opportunities on campus, just to go around and ask your friends or other people you see. Creating and developing mentoring relationships with faculty gives you amazing opportunities to get into different fields of study you're interested in. It may be a bit intimidating to try to go up to one of your teachers and talk to them about mentoring you, but most teachers are incredibly nice about it and will have something for you to do. If they don’t they’ll just tell you they aren’t looking for anyone at the moment and can point you in the right direction to finding someone to mentor you. Personally, I haven’t yet developed any strong connections with any faculty to mentor me but I hope to do that more next year because it is one thing about college that is very helpful and important. I think that developing strong relationships with other students is an incredibly important part of college. Throughout your college experience, you’ll meet so many new people, and trying to at least talk to and get to know them a little bit is really important. Creating a strong group of people to support you is very helpful if you are struggling in class or with anything else, and will let you lean on other people when you need to. One of the biggest obstacles that may come up when trying to pursue these relationships is being very busy. It may be difficult to make time to hang out with friends but trying your best to do that is really important to not get too stressed about school and not get burnt out with focusing too much on school. I think that I was fairly prepared for most of the aspects of university academic life. There are some things to consider though that are a bit of a change. A few things like having to share a room with someone else and having communal bathrooms can be a bit tricky to get used to but overall isn’t too bad. Also, getting used to navigating campus and getting to each of your classes by walking can take a bit of getting used to but again, is not too bad.