William Rust's "Expectations vs. Reality" Reflection Essay

I didn't really come into college expecting classes to be structured in a particular way, but I sure didn't expect that school would be completely online. I expected to have to run around campus from class to class, but ended up taking all my classes in mostly the same room. I didn't exactly tour the campus, but I visited the campus to see my sister and was excited to roam the campus each day next to hundreds of other students and make friends in all my classes. Instead I would only befriend any classmates who I had met previously or who I had group projects with. The structure of online classes was definitely weird, but I had some experience. In high school I took online community college classes which were on canvas and had week based assignments as well as finals. Thanks to those classes I understood the typical structure of a college course. The community college courses didn't have any zoom calls and were mostly based on text books. University classes, however, required live attendances as well as lectures being posted almost daily. The asynchronous lectures were a blessing and a curse, as they gave me plenty of free time to split up my workload, but I am terrible with time management so a mandatory structured schedule is much more suitable for me. I expected University classes to be better for me since I'm good at learning from lectures and taking tests rather than reading from a textbook and doing homework. Even though the University was less homework orientated and more test/lecture orientated than high school, I can only be good at learning from lectures if I watch them. I didn't anticipate the freedom of asynchronous classes and procrastination changed from turning homework late to watching lectures too late and cramming for tests.

In CPSG we covered a lot of topics such as pseudoscience and different types of logical fallacies. Although "science" is in the title science and global change, I was expecting mostly information about global warming and climate change in general. The fact that we went specifically into the subject of science was surprising and quite interesting. I thought that the science aspect of science and global change would be more related to using science to help global change such as green energy and lowering carbon emissions. The class however used science to prove and argue that global change is caused by humans and can have extreme consequences. Although our group couldn't all go on a field trip or physically go to colloquium, since we all lived on the same floor I still got to experience a sense of community in our living-learning program. Our floor was also able to go on the excursion as a group which substituted the chance of a field trip.

College life wasn't what I expected it to be mainly due to the fact that more than half the student population wasn't on campus. I was expecting to have a roommate and be constantly surrounded by other students wherever I went, but the campus turned out to be fairly empty. My scheduled roommate was instead put in the room next to mine and I was set to occupy a double by myself. College life is also completely different from high school in the manner of personal living. Living away from home wasn't too crazy, but living with a group of people your age made college feel like a summer camp, at least until classes became more engaging. The social aspect of college turned out to be very dependent on the floor you live on. I had a great time meeting the whole floor and becoming good friends with almost everyone, but other students on different floors told a different story. Thanks to the living learning program, almost everyone on our floor was an engineering student or some sort of STEM major. Since we all had a lot in common it was easy to become friends, but our group lacks diversity which I was expecting from a University this big. I was expecting to meet people with different pasts, but instead most everyone here had a similar highschool experience.

If I were to give advice to a future SGC student, I would say to instigate social encounters early on. In the first 2 weeks, most people don't have any close friends and are looking for friends. Whether it's knocking on neighbors' doors or sitting down at a table with random people, people don't mind you being extra social early on. With this considered, you can't expect everyone to want to be best friends with you after any social interaction. Another important thing to do is find people who are in the same class(es) as you. Going through college alone isn't easy, make friends in your classes(which isn't easy in zoom). Having a work buddy or study buddy, makes schoolwork less overwhelming.

[A FINAL NOTE: Thank You :)]

Last modified: 14 December 2020