This assignment is to summarize your experience in SGC so far. It must hit all the points listed below, but feel free to express this in your own style. After all, it is YOUR experience you are writing about!
Your report must be an essay written as an HTML webpage, linked to your main page, of at least 800-1000 words length (longer if necessary; but please do not obsess over word count). Please respond to the prompts below. If you wish to add additional material, however, go ahead.
If you type this up in MS Word or other word processor first, be careful to use only straight (not curly) apostrophes and quotation marks.
Make certain to link this page to your portfolio (as an item under "SGC Gallery and On-Line Projects"). And please: make sure you apply your own css to the webpage.
The Topic: As you finish up your first semester at the University (and in SGC), it is a time to reflect on the difference between what you expected this to be like and how this experience actually played out. In what ways was life as a college student different than you expected? Specifically address:
Also, please feel free to address how the semester worked in relation to your non-academic life: the difficulties, the benefits, the disappointments, and the unexpected highlights (if any!) of the situation you found yourself in this year.
Prior coming to college I had a lot of questions and ideas og how it was going to turn out. Since half my highschool life was spent online I really had no idea of what to expect once I arrived on campus. One thing I was worried about was if I would be able to manage the courseload of a college student since Covid really made me lose alot of my studying habits I used to get through highschool. But I was suprised to learn that the nature of most my classes was not different from my highschool classes. The lectures for my CS and Math classes were easy to follow and helped me learn alot. Homework and quizzes are alot less important in college then when compared to Highschool. In the beginning of the semester I was not prepared for how imporant these big exams are and I realized that unlike Highschool where you have many opporutnites to boost your grade after failing a test in college trying to come back after failing an exam is much more difficult. Prepping for exams this hard was something I have never done in Highschool so it was definetly a new expierence for me to try here. I was suprised that we covered html and css in CPSG because I thought it was going to be a science and enviromental change class only but instead we also got to learn how to create websites which can prove to be very useful later on. The outside of classroom activities in CPSG were very fun. The students in the program are very friendly and the activities act as a great way of meeting new people. My current dorm life is not at all what I was expecting when I was still in Highschool. I was a much more introverted person back then so I did not expect to see my self going out as often as I do. On campus you get to meet alot of new people so it causes you to change and as a result I saw myself going out with friends and meeting new people very often. Advice I would give to future SGC students would be to stay focused, open to change, and know your limits. College life can get very exciting and nobody can really predict how certain things will end up so I recommend just going with the flow and seeing where things take you. Its also important that you know your limits and stay ahead of your school work because it is very easy to procrastinate while you are in college. Overall I enjoyed my first semester and I can safely say that UMD lived up to my college life expectations.
[A FINAL NOTE: We do recognize the end of the semester is often a time when many high point value projects become due in all your courses, but we really hope that you will put serious thought and reflection into this essay. We (and hopefully you) can use this essay in future years to look back at your time in Scholars to reflect on how that experienced affected your future experiences at the University of Maryland.]