My first semester here at UMD has been a fairly quiet yet eventful 6 months. Quiet in that I didn’t pursue any extracurricular activities on campus but eventful in the way that there was always something different that happens every few days or so. Whether it be complaints from my friends about an assignment for one of their classes or plans to head out somewhere.
Speaking of classes, the classes that I have taken for the semester were nothing like what I had imagined. For starters, I thought that classes in general would be a lot more rigid in terms of academics. Stuff like stricter deadlines, more tests, and bigger projects/assignments were more in line for what I thought would be in college. I don’t know if it was because I had prior knowledge about the subjects in some of the classes that I were taking but aside from the occasional stacking assignment deadlines across classes, I didn’t really go through much trouble taking my classes from start to finish and ending them with an A or high B. I have heard about how some people who were straight A scholars in high school most often start getting C’s in their first semester but nothing like that has happened to me so far. Perhaps I may have cursed myself and the next set of classes I have will be infinitely more difficult than my current classes but we shall see as time progresses.
CPSG100 is an interesting class so to speak. There was always something new to learn during each colloquium that we had. One thing I definitely did not expect to learn was the true definition of science and the proper scientific method. The more I think of it now the more sense it makes that we would need to learn about what science actually is in order to better understand how we can fight against global climate change and the like but it was still a very unexpected topic to learn about at the beginning of the semester. I did expect to learn a bit more about climate change as a whole going into colloquium but seeing the different climate related factors that have caused some of the mass extinctions that have occurred in the past as well as some of the other topics that were covered were very informative and some parts of them definitely peaked my interest for those topics as well. Overall CPSG100 was not too difficult of a class to pass but it was definitely very informative in both concepts that involved the global climate as well as determining the age of fossils and such through the different kinds of rocks we can dig up and many more things beyond that.
CPSG100 did start at an awkward time of the day for me since it started at 3:30 pm and ended at 5pm. For starters, I am a commuter and live a bit of a distance away so I have to travel quite a bit from home to campus and vice versa. It does prove to be a bit troublesome at times considering that around the latter half of the semester by the time I finished colloquium it was starting to get fairly dark out. I do not own a car either so let me tell you when I say that taking the bus every day from home to campus can be a pain. Especially if there’s heavy traffic in the area. Still much like my expectations for how classes will go, my current college experience was not at all what I expected. I thought it would have been a tad bit more like the stereotypical type of college you would usually see on TV or in movies. I thought that walking to and from building to building would be a bit louder in terms of people talking and laughing rather than the sounds of buses and cars passing by. I also thought there would be more people out and about and fooling around in some of the open fields but it may just be because it's been getting colder that I haven't seen much of that. I also thought that I would have been able to afford a dorm room as well but here I am sitting at home typing away after realizing how much money I could save if I commuted rather than getting a dorm room.