This first semester at University of Maryland made me realize that college is significantly different from high school, mainly to the amount of autonomy I have.
The structure of college is different mainly because class times are chosen by me. In high school, I am forced to wake up in the early morning and attend classes for seven hours straight. Each day in college, I have maybe only two to three hours of class I have to attend. I also have the luxury of skipping some of the lectures if I already understood the material. Sometimes, I would put off lectures to meet some of the more important deadlines and watch the lectures later. Some of the recorded lectures ran over one hour long, which made it tedious for me. But otherwise, I appreciate the fact that I can change the speed of the lecture and go back to replay some of the parts that I did not understand the first time. I would not be given the opportunity to do that in person.
The grading in college is nothing special. Some classes require most of the grades to be based on exams. Most of my STEM classes are split around 60/40 with exams and projects. This was pretty like high school. I was honestly expected a much higher percentage of grades to be exams. But I still get a lot of homework or projects that can easily boost up my grade. I would assume upper-level classes will be more exam based.
One of the classes that I am taking, Comm107, was significantly different from my expectations. For this class, I would record all my presentations on Zoom, rather than giving it live. I found this unusual because that would essentially take away from the entire purpose of the class. In person, you would only have one chance to get the speech correctly. On the computer, I can just rerecord until I get it perfectly. Even though the class in much easier, I felt like the purpose of the class was defeated. Other than that, all my classes are normal.
The topics that I did not expect to be covered was the logical fallacy unit. I found this unit particularly interesting because it does not directly relate to the scientific ideas itself. This unit usually refers to the misconceptions people have when talking about science, which is why this unit is so important. Another small unit I was not expecting was how scientific journals are published. I was expecting to cover the ways we can personally combat climate change, since this program is about science and global change. Since this semester is online, the outside of class activities was lackluster. The excursion report was me listening to someone speak for thirty minutes and writing a report on it. I would imagine that attending a session in person would be much more entertaining. If I were on campus, the wellness modules would also be much more interesting to do. I could experience the facilities that the university has to offer.
This University life would obviously be different from an in-person experience. I am accustomed to the online format at this point. Online college seems much more organized than online high school partly since nobody got used to the abrupt shutdowns in March. Online high school was much easier since teachers just gave busy work. I also save a lot more time attending classes online because I can instantly join in Zoom rather walk from class to class like I would in person.
Future SGC students should not be that worried about the transition to college life. The grading is very similar to high school. Also, the grading is usually very fair. The learning experience compared to high school is improved because there are also teaching assistants that you can ask for help. There are so many resources you can use to improve your ability. UMD offers free tutoring sessions that you can utilize if you need help with a certain subject. It is very important to be on top of your work. Nobody will tell you to do your homework or study for the exam. The professors do not care about individual people’s grades, whereas high school teachers might. This means that you should try to do your lectures as soon as possible, not waiting until right before the exam to binge watch them all. While we all fall victim to procrastination, just make sure that you do the most important assignments early so you can get help if you are stuck. Make sure that you do not procrastinate on major projects, even if you think you can do it the last minute. The work given in college is very reasonable. So, you do not need to pull any all-nighters assuming you are diligently working.