December 11, 2022
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.
[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.]
ACADEMICS
Coming into college, I had my highschool mindset about my classes, grades, workload and overall academic experience. To shift into the college mindset was something that I had been working on the entirety of the semester. Walking into my classes, I had taken AP classes all throughout high school. My expectation was that the college classes would be much like the AP style of the high school classes. This was because the AP classes are styled in the manner of high school classes. Therefore, I was not prepared for the true nature of the college classes that were thrown at me. After completing the first month of college I had come to realize that college was very different from my AP classes expectations.
First off, the classes themselves were very different from my high school classes. The professors follow a very quick schedule in the classes. By this, I mean that the material is covered very quickly and it is up to the students mostly how the notes are to be taken.The free nature at which students are placed in the new college environment was something that had surprised me. The structure of classes in highschool was very structured and there was not this much freedom in favor of the students. Secondly, the grading system was something that had surprised me as well. The most surprising aspect of the grading system was the fact that there was now an A-, A, and A+ in the grades. The grades now mattered between a minus and a plus. This was something that puts more pressure on the student to strive to achieve a grade that reflected what they wanted, like me. Thirdly, the workload was also very polarized in college in the first semester. Some classes had a very heavy workload and some had a very light workload. Mainly, the amount of midterms a class had also changed the workload to reflect how much work was needed to prepare for the classes. Overall on an academic level, I would say that college has been completely new and it is hard. However, just because it is hard did not mean that I could not adapt and have fun pursuing my major that I had picked. The free nature of college as an overall has allowed me to pursue the future that I wanted. Of all the things, this was the fact that had made me happy the most.
CPSG100
When I got into CPSG I thought it would mostly be a class that was going to deal with learning about methods that dealt with changing how we can mitigate global problems by utilizing science. What I did not realize was that we would have to first cover why these problems exist on a global scale in the first place. I had to say I was surprised to learn that there was so much science behind everything. There was a lot of technical knowledge that I was pleasantly surprised to learn about. However, I would still love to learn about what we can do with all the science that we learn to tackle the problems that we face on a global scale. I wish that I can go on to learn about what can be done to mitigate the damages that are being caused to the world around us with the scientific knowledge that I am learning about. That covers the knowledge basis of this class The on hands experience that was associated with all the scholars programs at UMD was something that I loved as well. The fact that we go on field trips to learn about how nature works and what we can do to mitigate the damage is something that I had never done before. The first field trip to where we went to weed out ponds and patch up pathways by our very hands. These types of experiences really allow for a student to learn how they can apply what they learn in a physical manner. I really liked that about CPSG100. I did not expect that fun activity to be a part of the class.
LIFE AS A UNIVERSITY STUDENT
I am a commuter at UMD. I drive to UMD everyday of the week to attend my classes for the first semester. Compared to high school, I never had to drive on my own to school everyday. I got on a bus with all my friends and was commuting with all my friends everyday. Now, I am commuting by myself to college everyday. At first, it was lonely to commute, however, I began to make new friends and found times that worked best for me to continue to keep seeing people around me all the time. In high school, I was surrounded by the same faces for four years of my life. Moving on from the same faces for four years to new faces was something that had got me newly. However, now that a semester has passed, I am familiar with many people at campus and it is slowly starting to feel like home now.
ADVICE
Coming into college, prepare yourself with the fact that there will be new people and new class structures that you probably would not encounter. The thing is, it may be slightly scary at first and that is okay. The trick is to embrace the experience and move forward with every step. By doing this, you can enjoy college slowly and then end up with memories that you love.