I expected college to not be too stressful academically. And I was right! My high school, TJHSST, definitely prepared me well to handle the college workload. In fact, I would even say it over-prepared me: I didn't have that much free time in high school because of the workload, but now that I know how to handle it, I can earn good grades in my college classes pretty easily, and have more than enough free time to relax.
As for the structure of my classes, they were pretty much as I expected: lectures, quizzes, and a few exams that make up a large portion of your grade. I know that some people aren't used to exams being weighted so heavily in college, but I was prepared for it: many of my high school classes were also structured in this way.
Something that I didn't expect was that I found it much harder to form relationships with some of my professors than I initially thought. I expected to go to every professor's office hours, but when the dust settled with my schedule, most of the times just didn't work out. I knew that my class sizes would be larger, but didn't internalize that fact. It turns out that it's just mathematically harder to form relationships with your professors if they have several hundred students, because their attention is split, and it's harder to stand out.
I expected this class to have a strong focus on climate change and its effects on society. I was somewhat correct, but didn't get the full picture. Most strikingly, I didn't expect us to go over logical fallacies and pseudoscience in such detail. I was aware that these topics would be covered, but I expected maybe 1-2 classes on them. I expected the focus of the class to be about current societal impacts of climate change, but we haven't gone as far in depth about that, compared to what I expected.
However, thinking back on this, it actually makes a lot of sense to go so in depth about logical fallacies and pseudoscience. If we want to make significant changes in the world that address the problem of global warming, it's not enough for just me to know about the effects of climate change. For significant change to happen, the general public needs to know about climate change and its effects, which requires accurate information and logical reasoning. Of course, it's also not enough for just me to know about logical reasoning: the general public would need to know that too, but a focus on logical fallacies is at least a step in the right direction.
The outside-of-classroom activities involved a lot more reading and writing that I initially expected. I came into CPSG100 knowing that it was a science course, so I expected the assignments to test my technical knowledge of the Earth's climate. The quizzes do that, to an extent, but the majority of the time I spent outside of class was spent reading the assigned chapters and writing discussion posts. Looking back, I think this makes sense for an introductory class: the most technical stuff is best saved for later in the CPSG sequence, when we have more technical knowledge to better understand the mechanisms behind our global climate.
Before starting college, I expected to make a lot of my friends through Scholars and at my dorm, and I envisioned that my highest-quality conversations would happen as a result of being admitted into Scholars. However, all of my closest friends at UMD turned out not to be Scholars. A possible reason for this could be that I don't live in Centerville: I live in Chestertown, with the ETE Scholars. This makes it harder to make friends in SGC, since I don't see them in my dorm, and it makes it harder to make friends in my dorm, since I don't see them in class.
I also expected to make lots of friends through extracurriculars at UMD. This also turned out to be wrong. I'm not as confident as to why, but a hypothesis that I have is that I chose to try out many low-commitment clubs, whereas it's easier to make friends in high-commitment clubs, because you see the same people more often.
It turns out that I made basically all of my friends through my math and CS classes at UMD. In those classes, I would have many opportunities to interact with any given person, and since my interests are mostly in math and CS, I found it easier to make friends there.
Before starting college, I thought I wasn't ready to be an adult, and take care of myself. But, I actually got used to it very quickly. After the first week or so, it just felt normal to be away from my parents. When I went back home to visit my family, I received many comments that I looked and acted more mature. I learned that when significant changes happen in my life, after a while I just get used to it. I don't need to be afraid of the unknown anymore, because I can deal with whatever the situation throws at me.
If there's one thing that I would tell future SGC students, it's to be willing to try new things. I would suggest the following test when deciding whether to do something:
It can be hard to try new things. After all, there's already so much to adapt to. Why add even more unknowns to your life? I've found, though, that the best way to learn how to manage the unknowns of college is to just learn as much as possible about how things work around here, so that the unknowns become known.