The biggest difference for me between high school and college is that you’re on your own, you’re not on your own as in a sense of when you go to work at a job and you have your own apartment and you live there by yourself, but you are become the one responsible for your education, for what classes you’re taking, for success basically. In high school, you have your teachers there, you have your parents there, everyone’s there to help you — to help you succeed, to push at you to say have you gotten your paper done, it’s due two days from now, don’t wait till the night before. In college you really do become responsible for making sure that you set a schedule for yourself, that when you need something done you take care of it. People are there to help, but you have to ask for it. It’s no longer that your professors are gonna be pushing you to get something done.
Class sizes I think are the biggest difference that I’ve noticed in college and high school, like I went from a really small high school with about 400 people in my graduating class to a college that sometimes has 150 people in one section. So not being known by your professor, unlike in high school where my teacher knew who I was, knew if I was missing, I had to get used to that and making myself known to the professor just in case I needed extra help or to talk to them or something like that.
The assignments are much harder. I think that they expect you to think freely a lot more, have ideas of your own as opposed to other people’s idea that are just regurgitated.
High school assignment wise, it’s more on like a day to day basis; you have homework every night and you kind of review everything the next day. College, it’s more long term assignments like you would get assigned a paper at the beginning of the semester that wouldn’t be due till the end of the semester, and of course being the slacker and the procrastinator that I am, I would wait until the week before the assignment was due and just try to jam everything in there. So it’s more like balancing your time in college with assignments, and it’s definitely a lot more reading — a whole lot more reading than high school. If you don’t believe anything your high school teachers tell you, believe that. It’s a lot more work in college than it is in high school.
For me the biggest difference was group work. In high school we didn’t have a lot of group assignments, if you did you did them in class and it was over and done with. But at my college, you have an assignment with people for like a whole semester … and a semester is months, so you have to get used to these people, you have to deal with them, you all have to get your schedules together, and when you’re getting schedules together it can be difficult because people are working, people have different class schedules, you may only have this one class together; but you have to get the assignment done, and honestly the professors don’t care how difficult it is to a certain extent. If someone’s not pulling their weight, like I say there’s 4 people and one person’s not pulling their weight, the 3 of you are still responsible for this assignment to be done whether or not that person picks up the slack. Usually the professor doesn’t want to know until after the assignment is done.
I feel that college is a little more challenging in the way you have to study. It’s not like high school where you had lots of little grades to boost your grade up. A lot of times one class will have 3 tests and those are your only grades. So you have to make sure that you are very well prepared for those 3 tests, rather than in high school where you had 3 tests but you had 5 quizzes and lots of homework assignments and things like that. A lot of professors in college don’t give you those boost ups, so you need to make sure that you’re prepared.
[Banner: “What I Like About College”]
Social life in college is great. [ laughing ] It’s a lot of freedom and a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of parties, and you have to learn to say no to going to certain parties because you have a midterm the next day and it’s just not a good idea.
For the first time I could actually choose what I wanted to learn more about and there are requirements, but once you go through those, and a lot of those were very, very interesting and a lot of those requirements I could actually tailor to my interests because they would give you choices of what classes you want to pick to fulfill those requirements.
I love meeting new people from different places, and just learning different cultures, and also being a little bit more independent that I was in high school.
There’s so many different types of people out there that you never encounter until you go to college, because when you’re in high school a lot of times, it’s the same people who you live around, who you play sports with, that you see every day. And in college it is a situation where I will see one person one day and next semester I will meet a totally new group of people.