I won’t lie, I was really scared of college in high school. There was a feeling of absolute, almost irrational, dread regarding college, but people framed it to be significantly worse than it is. In terms of my classes, the workload is actually lower, but the classes move faster and there’s more information to retain, which is especially stressful since tests are the highest part of your grade. That aspect of college is slightly worse than how I imagined it. I had midterms and finals in high school, but they spanned over the entire school year, weren’t that big a part of the overall grade, and I stopped having midterms during and after covid, so I didn’t have to even deal with the cumulative testing format for half of high school. And if that's bad enough, there are 3 of these 'midterms' and all three of them were at the same time this semester. Those 3 weeks I felt so burnt out and it's the exact feeling I imagined in high school but I have more freedom in college, which makes all the difference. I can choose how I want to destress. I can walk wherever I want or find quiet isolated areas where I can take time for myself and no one hounds me. Or I can not attend classes when I'm not up for them physically or mentally. One thing that I didn't expect at all was how poorly run one of my classes was. The professor overcomplicated his explanations and didn't go in a logical order for the problems he went over, which was confusing because it was a math class. This semester, it didn't matter that much because the class content was easy and by using outside sources it's an easy A, but seeing that I'm paying as much as I am, it surprised me that this was a universal experience in this and other math classes. Ultimately, this is just something that happens and will be something I'll have to deal with as long as I'm in school.
Entering college I had no clue what College Park Scholars was. After going to orientation and learning about the program, I thought that we'd go straight into climate change but instead started with the basics of science and reasoning. Things I had spent a week on in middle and high school, we spent an entire semester on, and it was shockingly valuable. I thought I knew how science worked, but I was wrong. Learning from SGC this semester reinforced and taught me critical aspects of human nature that intrinsically compete with logic and how we will constantly be in the process of reconstructing our internal logic biases in order to successfully engage in science. Since we spent most of the semester covering science and reason, we spent very little time on actual climate change, but after learning what the first semester was about, I was a bit shocked to actually start covering climate change and how it's documented. There was a lot of information in the last 2 lectures, but they acted as good overviews for what's to come in my second semester. The one thing I was confident about in high school regarding College Park Scholars was the excursions. After reading the website, I knew that we took trips off campus, but my assumption was that they were ALL community service trips. After reading the SGC description I thought the program was a hands-on outdoorsy community service. That's actually the reason why I chose SGC. I didn't know there was a class aspect at first. But, Service Day lived up to my expectations. I enjoyed it so much.
For the lived experience of college, I knew what to expect, but I couldn’t fathom what the actual experience would be like. Like I knew all of the theory about college but i didn't understand it in practice. Like I knew that my schedule would be completely different, and I knew that I would have more freedom, and I knew that I'd be living on my own, and I knew that everything would be expensive, but I just didn't understand how it all came together. I now see all the theory and the little moments in between. Walking to class, having more chances to hang out with friends, having a completely new space to myself, running out of snacks occassionally, all of these small things are what really define the college experience outside of classes and I really enjoy these parts. Another expectation is that I thought I would be able to adjust easily to dorms, and I did. While the bathrooms are annoying sometimes, with people not cleaning up their spaces, it is worth it. I'm realy happy I'm living on campus.
Lastly, advice I would give to future SGC students are to stay true to your passions and keep an open mind. Both of these go hand-in-hand because oftentimes people go into college with this idea of who they're supposed to be and what they're supposed to do, when they've never had the space to actually explore that. But now they do. There's so many opportunities and new things in college and I say try out whatever comes your way, you could learn something about yourself that you didn't know. It's also just fun to try things. On the note of keeping an open mind, say no when something isn't working for you. Just like trying new things, you are keeping an open mind when you decide to not do things.