Going into college, I didn't really understand what I would have to do to maintain my grades. I took a lot of AP classes in high school so I thought I would be prepared for college. For most of my classes in high school I rarely studied outside of class. My highschool also has a reassessment policy where I could retake all tests, even in AP classes, which is not how things work in college. I thought that college would be pretty much the same as high school as far as course difficulty, maybe a little more difficult. I was completely wrong. Whereas I could passively move through high school, my college classes require far more commitment and initiative. I have to actively study for all of my classes now. If I don’t study ahead of time for classes like MATH141, I won’t be able to keep up with the teacher's lecture. I also learned that professors are not always great teachers. My math teacher in particular is a good example of this. It’s very clear that he is really smart and an expert in his field, but he also isn’t really good at teaching. He teaches his class of mostly college freshmen the way you would teach a math major. I would lose focus half way through class and leave more confused than when I entered. I had to teach myself most of the content, with some help from the TAs.
I’ve enjoyed CPSG100 for the most part. I didn’t really know what to expect going into it, I mostly expected it to be weekly lectures without a lot of homework. I was a little surprised by how much reading there was. I also didn't think we would spend so much time on logical fallacies and what counts as science. I hope your feelings aren’t hurt if I say that it was a little boring at the time. I do see how it is important to know now, especially in our scholars program. I liked how you connected logical fallacies and pseudoscience to climate change denial. I thought that tied it to the other main topics of science and global change pretty well. We didn’t really fully explore the effects of climate change, which is what I thought the class was going to be about. We started learning about it in the last few weeks, but the class was mostly about what counts as science and how to identify pseudoscience. As for the outside of classroom activities, I thought that we would have a lot less choice as far as excursions. I appreciated how many extra excursions/lectures there were throughout the semester. I also thought we wouldn’t have free time on the New York trip, but I liked that we did. For the most part, it was less of a chore than I thought it would be.
I live in Centreville Hall on campus. Campus life is a lot grimier than I had imagined. The showers are not great, I go home every two weeks just to take a shower. My room was also smaller than I had anticipated. It's also smaller than every other dorm room I’ve been in as well so I think that’s pretty weird. Even the room I had during orientation in Denton was better than the room I have here. I feel a little ripped off. Other than my dorm, college life has been good. Going into college I thought I would do everything I hadn’t done in high school in my first week. That’s not how it happened at all. I still haven’t gone to a party, but I don’t think that’s really my scene either way. I think I’ve grown a lot during this first semester but that doesn’t mean that I need to hit those milestones. It doesn’t affect how cool or fun I am. My world has gotten a lot bigger since I came to college. I was really isolated at home the way that most queer teenagers are, especially when they have conservative immigrant parents like mine. It’s been really good for me to be able to meet and interact with people like me all the time. On that front, I was correct about what my college experience would be like. It opened me up to a lot of different people, but it wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be.
To future SGC scholars, I would tell them to make sure they stay on top of their work. It would have been way easier for me to study for my finals if I hadn’t procrastinated doing this essay until the week before finals. It also is beneficial for your mental health because it is very stressful to have to work all day to get your work done. Also, remember that you will have work from your classes from the first day of class. Even if you don’t have homework, it might be expected that you study the material before coming to class. You need to be working on your classes from the first week or you will fall behind.