I attended high school at the Science and Mathematics Academy. This is a rigorous magnet school program that accepts about 55 applicants each year. Due to the rigorous nature of the SMA, I was told that I would become very prepared for the type of workload that I should expect in college. I got this idea from both my parents, and former students who had come back to the SMA for one reason or another, and now that I’ve experienced almost a whole semester in college, I have to say that I agree with that statement. Therefore in regards to the classes that I take excluding the scholars colloquium, I feel that my expectations of the structure, delivery, and types of graded items were very close to reality. Out of the four main classes that I’m taking and have taken this semester excluding the scholars colloquium, three of them were small enough that they could pass for a high school class, in terms of the class population size and the size of the learning environment. The fourth class was definitely a new experience, being gigantic with a little under 300 total students in the class. I knew that college would have these kinds of classes, but nothing can prepare you for the actual experience until it actually happens.
If I had to pick the most surprising thing that was discussed in class during colloquium, I think I would choose the repeated references to the show “Ancient Aliens.” This is something that I never could have guessed would be mentioned in a setting such as this one. From my time at the SMA, I took AP Environmental Science, a required class for SMA freshmen. From this, I learned about different ways that humans can help prevent, or probably more accurately attempt to mitigate the effects of climate change, for example, through use of energy sources such as wind turbines. It did surprise me that this topic was not covered as much as I had expected in the first semester of SGC, although I do expect this to be mentioned more heavily in future semesters. To be honest, I’m not completely sure what I was expecting for outside-of-classroom activities, or even if I had any expectations at all for this. For reasons I do not want to explain in depth, I hate social situations, which as a result ends up limiting the amount of outside-of-classroom activities that I participate in. However, of the 43 SMA students from my graduating class, 12, including myself, are students at the University of Maryland. When it does happen, I do enjoy hanging out with this group of people.
College life is basically my vision of college life from when I was in high school. The only difference is that I am actually living it, and thus experience all of the little quirks that a high school student would miss when trying to imagine college life. Now that I live away from my parents, I feel as if the bond of the parent-child relationship which always prevented me from really living as if I were on my own has finally been broken. Even though I know that there are differences between how my life will be once I finally live on my own and now, such as the fact that I don’t cook my own meals, and I don’t technically have a full time job that pays for everything, this experience is proving that I am capable of handling living on my own. There is one thing that is actually quite annoying that I did not include in my vision of college life. I did not anticipate most of my meals coming from a single dining hall. The north dining hall is very small, and the food is not as good as the Y or the south dining hall, and although the south dining hall food is quite good, it is so far from all of my classes and my residence hall that it is simply not realistic to walk to it. My route from my dorm room to the south dining hall would literally have me walking past the entrance to the Y.
To future SGC students, I would advise them to be a good student in general, meaning to show up to classes, to complete all of their work on time, and to ask for help whether they desperately need it and may die without it, or if the worst that could happen is a bad grade on a single class assignment. I will say though, if you made previous year’s students do this, it would have been nice to make their advice easily and knowingly accessible to our class.
In general, though, I really liked the SMA. Both the students and the faculty composed a very caring, tight-knit community, but unfortunately it has appeared so far that there is no example at the University of Maryland that could rival this experience. I hope I am proven wrong in saying this, but as of right now, I feel that once I graduated from the University of Maryland, I will have better memories and a greater fondness for the SMA than here.