Sumona's Freshman Time Capsule Essay

I think the courses that came as the greatest revelation were my biology and chemistry classes. This is because I had taken biology and a little bit of chemistry in high school so I felt that I had a general understanding of both of those subjects but the workload that I got here at college was a lot. Even though they were introductory courses, I felt that the hours outside of class that I was putting into this class was how it would be if I were taking a 200 or even a 300 course. There were many days where I would just be staring at problems for hours because I was not able to comprehend or I just didn’t have the energy to complete them. Some of the strategies that I discovered in order to keep up with these classes is that you need to use a lot of outside resources. At least for the professors that I had, they weren’t the best at explaining concepts and calculations (which biology and chemistry are full of), and it made it harder for me to understand what was going on in the class. Watching videos or reading articles about the concepts that I was covering in class helped me to better understand and connect the information to things that I already knew. The greatest success I had in developing faculty relationships was being able to connect with Dr. Merck (no I am not just saying that because I am in SCG haha 😂). During the beginning of my freshman year in the first semester, I had a lot of problems with the website that I had to create for the SGC class and I remember visiting Dr. Merck almost every week to try and understand this error. Eventually we were able to get it fixed, but the time that I spent with Dr. Merck really gave me an understanding of how he was as a professor and a person. Towards the end of first semester I had an issue with a class payment that I had been trying to figure out for about two months, so I had contacted Dr. Merck and asked him if he knew how I could proceed in that situation. Dr. Merck not only pointed me in the right direction, but he also put me in contact with somebody that I had not contacted before and I was thankfully able to fix the situation. The friends that I have made at the university have become a huge part of my college life. They are the biggest supporters that I have here (apart from my brother). In the beginning of the first semester, I struggled to find friends that I could truly count on and hang out with. I had many acquaintances and even had a couple from high school, but an obstacle was that since we didn’t see each other as often our friendship slowly faded. The friends that I made this semester have been a game changer. Also with some of the friends that I made my freshman year, I realized that they weren’t people I wanted to be around due to things they did and split from them because I wasn’t able to trust them. Incoming freshmen, when you make a connection with your peers, be honest with them and show commitment. In every relationship, the pillars are trust, loyalty, passion, and respect (or at least they are in my eyes). When you have connections with your peers, especially in SGC, you are all different majors and can lean on each other especially if you want to talk about academics. I was probably the least prepared for the workload that I was going to be getting in my classes. Like I mentioned before, it was a lot for me to deal with. I am a person that tends to get overwhelmed and stressed quite easily so having to deal with the workload from biology, chemistry (labs included), and math was not the easiest thing to get used to. As time went on, I was able to figure out how to balance my workload and have been working on improving my mental health as well.

Last modified: 11 May 2023