College classes are much different than high school classes in that lectures are just that: lectures. Professors will never hand out worksheets or classwork because lectures are for teaching, not practicing. I do wish I'd been more prepared for this kind of lifestyle sooner because I wasn't prepared for the fact that I would have to, well, prepare. And thats the biggest difference to me: preparation. Assignments and homeworks are few and far between (though that depends on the class), which means that you'll have to review all the information by yourself. Since I didn't realize how much I'd actually have to study, this aspect of college classes hit me super hard, especially considering how terrible I am at studying. It's something I'm planning to work on next semester by sitting closer to the front in my classes and interacting with people to make study groups.
For CPSG100, I definitely didn't expect to learn so much about the definition of science, or even that there was this much depth to the term of science itself. Since we as a society tend to take science for granted, it was very insightful to me when science was broken down into its most basic form. I definitely thought that was unique, and something I wouldn't learn in any other class. What surprised me was that we didn't go into the topic of climate change that much. Since I expected to only be learning about global change, only learning about it for the last quarter of the semester was surprising. Obviously, I'm expecting CPSG101 to discuss climate change in greater detail, but for this semester, there wasn't much about it.
As a whole, university life gives you a ton of freedom. I knew this was the case going in, but there was no way I could expect how much difference it would make. For example, there's no "lunch time". You decide when you eat, which varied anywhere from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM for me, which is a major departure from the rigid 30 minute lunch blocks of high school. Another way there's more freedom is attending the classes themselves. Since there wasn't any attendance (for classes that weren't CPSG100), you go to classes whenever you want. This led to me regularly skipping my morning classes because I slept through my alarm, and it got so bad at one point that I was waking up later than 12:00 PM every day because I could. Of course, that's the thing: since lectures are inherently structured differently than high school classes, you can skip them whenever you want, provided that you find another way to do the material on your own time. This combination of factors made it so that college as a whole felt more "casual" than high school, and that was definitely something I couldn't prepare for.
I'd give future SGC students the advice that OH MY GOD A LOT OF THINGS SUCK. Going into college, parents and older people and stuff were telling me that "college will be the best years of your life" or something like that. DON'T BELIEVE THEM. IT'S ALL A LIE. While there is a lot more freedom in college, it also comes with a lot more studying, so the whole "college gives you so much freedom" thing is offset by the majority of that freedom being taken up by studying or preparing for something. College can be fun sometimes, but it's also a lot of pain and suffering. It will not be "the best years of your life". BE WARNED!