Throughout my first full year at the University of Maryland, I have had a number of learning experiences in and out of the classroom. This school provides more than just classes and I have been able to experience that first hand throughout my first year here.

The most surprising class that I ended up taking this year has been ENEE101. It was my second intro to engineering class taken, but it gave me a very broad perspective of the field of electrical engineering. While I experienced it entirely online and mostly on my own, I could understand how each lab introduced me to an elementary understanding to not only the many courses I will take throughout my career at this school, but to my future career as an engineer.

My first intro class (ENES100) was a much simpler introduction to engineering as a whole, and something that I was very luckily able to experience in high school. This class however, went into relative depth on interesting topics in my field of engineering. We saw specific examples of careers in our field including image processing, machine learning, AI development and much more. One of my favorites dealt with transmitting music waves through a microfiber and playing it on my speaker.

While this specific class is tailored to my field of study and may not seem applicable to you, many majors have similar introductory courses and I encourage any students interested to look at all of their options and test the waters on topics you may not know too much about.

However, due to COVID and online instruction I made very little connections with any professors and faculty members. I was lucky enough to be part of this scholars program and interact with these amazing professors, but outside of this class where I have consistent instructors very little contact was made other than professional questions about the courses.

Though, I would definitely recommend sending your professors emails about any questions you have. It does not even need to be about the course, any questions that a student has about the department or research opportunities will be happily answered by professors and I have personal experience with consistent, fast responses from all faculty members.

I was also very lucky to be placed in the room that I am in on campus. Pursuing on campus housing was probably the best thing that I did this year; the friends and connections that I made here are invaluable and the experience, however limited by the pandemic it may have been, was one I will never forget. My floor was filled with other scholars students, many of whom are in the SGC program with me. From the first week almost the entire floor was out together and excited to meet new people. The greatest obstacles in these relationships often have to do with social differences and being left out. To overcome these challenges I encourage all new students to be very open minded and take every opportunity to meet new people and interact with the students surrounding you, as you never know who you may end up becoming good friends with.

This year I was woefully unprepared for the difficulty of classes and the amount of work needed in order to perform in class. This is not to scare new students, as the workload was very manageable, but rather a warning for them to manage it. In high school I was content going through classes with minimal effort and getting to my work whenever I could. In college you need to organize your workload much better and utilize the sources available to you. This is one of the biggest things I have learned, use the sources available to you! I was failing my chemistry class last semester when I started attending guided study sessions (GSS) with the university, ending up with a much better than passing grade by the end of the semester. For almost all classes, and certainly all first year classes, there is available GSS, tutoring, office hours and student created study groups all to your benefit. Use them even if you feel like you might be doing fine, as they can only help at the end of the day.

Last modified: 11 May 2021