This semester has naturally been vastly different from what I had expected. I have taken all of my classes online and most were asynchronous. In terms of the way classes are run, I was not surprised. I definitely came into the semester with an open mind, and willingness to work hard no matter the situation. I had decided to come to campus so that I could have as much of an experience as possible and hopefully make new friends.

Of course, my classes were definitely not ideal. My classes being online definitely had an impact on many different aspects of my college experience. For example, my chemistry professor taught 800 students at once, which forced her to move all of her lectures asynchronous. It was because of this that my scheduled Tuesday-Thursday lectures were posted Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and my Wednesday lecture was on Monday during one of my zoom classes.

There are some benefits to these asynchronous. When I am watching my lectures, for any of my classes, I have the ability to stop and rewind the videos to make sure I can fully grasp the material. This usually means that my 50 minute lectures take closer to an hour a half, but it means (slightly) less time spent studying later. Overall, college is what I predicted, the classes are hard, but not impossible, and I was able to meet some really good people. It only takes a little bit of hard work and time management and I might even call this first semester easy. Only, I’m speaking relative to what I expected and it wasn’t actually easy for me.

Scholar’s happened to be a very unique experience for me this semester. The first two weeks I had the pleasure of meeting all of the people on my floor that happened to be in this class. Due to our immediate shared connections I quickly found a group of people who I could come to for help in any of my classes, especially SGC. I think that, while I had always anticipated to become good friends with the people in this program, we became much closer because of the special circumstances of this semester. I did not have the chance to go out and meet other people that I normally would have. These people were involved with all of my scholar activities in one way or another. In fact, my trip to the Zoo for my excursion included almost the whole floor.

The content this first semester was definitely not what I had foreseen and in a very good way. As I am sure has been said many times, the title of this class led me to believe that we would go more in depth into climate change itself this first semester. I personally follow climate news relatively closely, and expected to discuss things such as our country’s stance on the Paris Climate Agreement, and how our own presidential election could have a major impact on what our world looks like in 10-15 years.

However, I was pleasantly surprised when we went into these broader topics. I especially liked the first book, Don’t Believe Everything You Think: 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking by Thomas Kida. I was very interested in the points he had to make as some of them reminded me of a book I read previously, How to Lie with Statistics by Darrel Huff, in that we as humans need to be more skeptical of the things that are presented to us. Accepting things as they are can be extremely dangerous both for your immediate well being and for the sake of progress in humanity.

As I said before life as a student was very different from my high school experience. I have definitely spent way more time studying than I ever have before, but I’ve also spent more time with other students than I would in high school. Despite the pandemic, I was still able to meet a very close group of friends this semester and we shared some great memories. With all of my classes being online, these people are realistically the only reason that I decided to go to College Park. In many ways this aligned with what I expected.

One thing that differs is the amount of time I spent on work. I knew that the workload would be much greater than high school, but I felt that most days I would be working from when I woke up to when I went to bed, excluding an hour here or there when I had to step away in order to stay focused. This is likely due to the nature of not having a strict schedule. I only had 3 classes where I needed to show up on zoom and the rest of my work was slowed down by both my focus and the availability of time. I basically took up all of the time with work since there was not much else to do.

I would tell future students to try to set as strict of a schedule as possible. We, as humans, naturally won’t always be able to keep up with a structured schedule, but it would have definitely helped me focus on a goal so that I could be more productive. I would also tell them that they should not be too shaken up by a poor test. If you do poorly on a test, it only means you need to work a bit harder for the next one. Other than final exam’s, one grade will likely not mean pass or fail for a class, and there are plenty of resources to help you. Seriously, there are so many resources to help you study for any class and all new students should take advantage of them.

Last modified: 13 December 2020