This is the first part of a three-part blog post looking back at my first semester at American University, and the challenges and accomplishments that I have had to face in the marathon that was this past semester. This first part looks back at my classes from first semester; the remaining two parts will be posted before I depart for home on Tuesday.

Everyone has a different experience at high school, and no two high schools are exactly the same. Overall, my high school experience was one that I most definitely enjoyed and treasured (even if I didn’t always say so at the time, after all, hindsight is always 20/20), while some of my classmates and floormates here hated high school, and most are rather indifferent. I found my high school classes to involve a good amount of work and commitment, but I generally didn’t have too difficult of a time making good grades, graduating high school with a 3.96 cumulative GPA. Though I wouldn’t come close to characterizing myself alongside some classmates whom have said that they never really did any of the work in high school, just took the tests and got As in the class. But after my four years at Aragon, I would say that it would be rather difficult to get through with all As by never doing any of the work; even if you were miraculously genius enough to pull that off, the teachers and counselors there would be sure to push you towards a more challenging course load. ;)

But regardless of how one’s high school experience was, or how their high school classes were organized, there is no comparison to classes at the university level. The transition from high school classes to university classes literally feels like running head-first into a boulder because it’s the middle of the night and you have no idea where you’re going. And then try adjusting to the different dynamics of a full-time university course load while you’re just beginning to wrap your head around the fact that you have been away from home for two weeks, are living on your own, are starting to figure out that you’ve got to support yourself, and oh yeah, you’re going to be here for another sixteen weeks.

Well, if I was to summarize the differences between high school classes and AU classes, here’s what I would point out:

High school gives you class schedules. At university, they’re more like like life schedules.
At high school, I had six (or seven) 51-minute classes at the same time each and every day. I woke up at the same time every morning, left home on my bike at the same time each day (except late-start Wednesdays, but we’ll overlook that for now), had the same classes each and every day at the same time, and went back home. Routine: it’s a wonderful thing.

Now welcome to American University, where each class is 75 minutes long (though I actually got used to the longer time rather quickly) and only happens twice a week at alternate days. On Mondays and Thursdays I have two classes in a row from 11:20 AM-2:00 PM. But from Tuesdays and Fridays I have a class at 8:30-9:45 AM, then a short break, then a 11:20 AM-12:35 PM class, then a longer break, and then a 3:35-4:50 PM class. And as for Wednesdays, nothing. No day-to-day consistency, no routine. And because I now live at school, I’m always here and can’t get away from it. There is no specific time to wake up and get breakfast, time to go to school and do stuff at school, and then time to go home and do home stuff.

Fortunately my schedule next semester has my classes starting at 9:55 AM across the board (except Wednesdays, though those days will now have an 11:20 AM class), giving me a little bit more much-needed consistency to my schedule. Which is good, because although I’ve attempted on a number of occasions to budget the rest of my life this past semester, it has repeatedly been a lost cause.

Fewer minutes of class does NOT mean fewer minutes of work.
When I was in elementary school, there was this presumed golden rule of the amount of time you should have to spend on homework. Essentially, you were supposed to take your grade number and multiply it by 10 minutes: a 2nd grader would have 20 minutes of homework per night, a 3rd grader would have half an hour of homework, and so on. Well, the failings of this rule became quite apparent by middle school, and far more apparent in high school. (If only I only had 2 hours of homework a night last year, heh!)

And yet, this past summer, I actually had this idea that with only having five classes lasting 150 minutes/week each at university (compared to high school, which had six or seven classes lasting 249 minutes/week each), I would have so much more free time. Ha. I’ve actually been told that the golden rule here is that you should expect to spend twice as much time studying outside of class as you do taking the class. Well, if you can find me 1500 minutes (that’s 25 hours) of available time each week to study for classes, I’ll be happy to oblige. And don’t forget that I’m getting 7-8 hours a sleep each night, eating 2-3 meals a day, actually taking those classes that I’m studying for, and participating in extracurricular and recreational activities to ensure that I can retain my sanity around here.

I stayed caught up with my reading for about the first week, and never caught up since. By the end of the semester, I pretty much gave up trying to do the reading assignments, because (as I frequently explained) I was having a crazy enough time keeping up with the papers. During the sixteen weeks of this semester I wrote 21 papers. 12 of these papers were major assignments requiring five pages or more. And these written assignments often overlapped: I had three papers due on Friday, September 18 (and a fourth one due the day before), and I had four papers due on Friday, November 13.

The readings for most of my classes alone would fulfill the two-for-one studying rule quite nicely, with as many as 100 pages of reading assigned per week. Granted, a few of my classes were a bit more sane with the reading load (I point out the worst offenders below), but I’m an Equal Opportunity Procrastinator, so this semester I’ve become an expert in faking it. And I’m not alone, which has actually led me to my next little revelation…

You’re not supposed to actually do all of the assigned reading.
Okay, you are actually supposed to do all of the assigned reading, or at least I’m sure that this is the case from the professor’s view. But as I’ve already alluded to above, actually doing all of the reading will put you through a world of pain not unlike what taking five AP classes in high school would put you through. (Though for my old classmates in high school who actually did take that many AP classes, I admire you.) Though you’re not supposed to ignore the readings entirely, and this is what I’m going to try to do better next semester. Skim through the readings to get the overall idea for when the professor goes over the content in the next lecture, and be prepared to ask questions of the professor. For someone like me, who is predominantly an audible learner, hearing the professor go over the content probably helps me a lot more than noodling over the reading for hours on end would. And also for next semester, I’m going to try to give some more focus to the classes that have a more sane amount of reading to do by actually putting those readings on a higher priority.

And I’m not making this advice up off the top of my head, I’ve actually had a classmate tell me this specific advice.

It is much harder to get an A at university. It’s also not as important.
Remember why we’re all told to perform well and get good grades in high school? It’s to make our transcript as strong as possible for when we submit our grades to colleges and universities that we’re applying to. While the oft-quoted “it’s better to get a B in an AP class than an A in a common placement version of that class” phrase is used at high school, As are still great things to aim for in high school. And for me, quite frankly, it was expected that I would achieve an A in my classes, with the occasional B. My transcript was fairly strong, even though it didn’t get me into Stanford or Yale. But it did fare me well by getting me into the Honors program at AU and a very sizable merit scholarship.

But now I’m here at AU, and as far as I know, when I graduate in 2013, wherever I’m going probably won’t be looking meticulously over my grades from all eight semesters, and will probably be satisfied with whatever degree I end up having. Or if for whatever reason they do end up looking at my grades, they surely won’t be quite as competitive as what I dealt with during the college admissions process. Now that’s not to say that there’s no incentive to keep my grades up. In order to keep my scholarship and my place in the Honors program, I do need to maintain a cumulative 3.25 GPA. But that’s quite a bit lower than the 3.96 I finished high school with.

And the dynamics of earning an A grade here are considerably different. At high school, you start out the semester with a perfect score (0 out of 0 still counts as a 100% A+), and if you do the work, and show that you’ve gotten the hang of the material on tests and on papers, you can pretty much walk out with an A. Not true here. While most of my professors do factor attendance into the grade (yes, professors DO care a lot about your attendance in class, so let’s eradicate the myth that attendance doesn’t matter right here and now), the grade is primarily calculated based on the major papers and exams of the class. You don’t get a bunch of homework to help you score some easy points in the final grade. Your grade is based on papers and exams, and the exams themselves often consist of long-answer or essay portions themselves, so writing is the name of the game. And whereas in high school you might start out with an A by default, here you start out with a C by default. C means “average,” after all. If you do a good job on your paper, you’ll probably get a B. But don’t expect to see that gorgeous A or A+ on your paper unless you really do have a paper that is superior. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to get an A; I’ve gotten a couple of As on my papers this past semester. But I am not expecting to depart from the Fall 2009 semester with all As by a long shot; if I get one A and four Bs, I will be quite satisfied with my academic performance this semester. (The unofficial 72-hour deadline for my grades has already passed, yet I’m still waiting for grades from all but one of my professors, so those details are still TBA…)

But now some brief words on each of my classes (all of which were General Education classes, since I have no major yet)…

American Society (MTh 11:20-12:35)
A more accurate name for this class would be “Introduction to Sociology,” as the class was primarily about learning the terms and methods of sociology as applied to aspects of American society. While it is definitely interesting to note some of the sociological structures that make up the more unequal and controversial aspects of our society, I don’t think that sociology is really up my alley. Even so, our professor was very enthusiastic and energetic about sociology, and lot of fun to be in class with. She actually was dramatically similar to my biology/biotech teacher from high school, almost in an eerie sort of way.

World Politics (MTh 12:45-2:00)
This class wound up not meeting my expectations in many respects. Maybe I signed up for it because I thought that I would have an interest in politics, though my interest in politics has certainly waned a bit. This class could also have had a more accurate name: “Introduction to International Relations.” This class actually had a bit of overlaps with my American Society class in a couple of places in looking at how international cultures and societies come together. However the more recurring themes included globalization, the changing role of the state, and the three major worldviews on IR. But again, this isn’t really a field that I think I want to pursue.
However I had a very difficult time acclimating to this class and this professor. World Politics is apparently also one of the required introductory courses in the School of International Service; consequently you could count the number of non-SIS majors in the class on the fingers of one hand, and I was one of them. Talk about going from being the big fish in a small pond to the small fish in a huge lake. Our professor also wasn’t present for the first week because he was adopting a boy from Russia (and apparently was unable to pick up his adopted son at any other time), making it harder for me to get used to him. He also was by far the worst offender in terms of assigning way too much reading to do, and for the first half of the semester, he really didn’t go over it in class, instead “facilitating” big class discussions which always strayed away from the main point.
In short, this was my worst class of the semester in terms of how successful I was in it overall.

Critical Approach to Cinema (TF 8:30-9:45 AM; Th 8:10-10:40 PM)
This was a class that I did not have high hopes for at the beginning of the semester, because I didn’t really like movies overall. However, I was pleasantly surprised about how much I got out of the class. Granted, having to throw in a late Thursday night portion in addition to an early 8:30 class wasn’t great (even if the Thursday portion was just watching movies–without popcorn), but overall the movies we watched were better than most of the trash that you see in the theaters today. And even though I still didn’t like about half of the movies we watched, it was quite illuminating to observe the cinematic elements that go into making movies, and just how much of what we see in a movie is done on purpose, even though we take it for granted. My main criticism: the final exam required us to remember aspects of twelve of the fourteen movies we had seen this semester and write about them in medium-answer responses. Trying to remember a movie you saw three and a half months ago is kind of–ahem–difficult. Still, even though I don’t intend to go into Cinema Studies, this class was certainly much more enjoyable than I had been anticipating.

Western Legal Tradition (TF 11:20-12:35)
Okay, I’m not sure about this one. Maybe I thought that I would really dig into this class after how much I had enjoyed the semester of Law & Society I took during my senior year at high school. Well, that idea evaporated when the assignments for the first two classes were to read two Greek plays by Aeschylus. From there, the course moved on to studying the writings and idea of various political philosophers, first Aristotle, then Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Condorcet, and Burke, as well as covering the governments of the Greek polis (or city-state) and the Roman Republic, the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and the French Revolution. Not really what I had in mind when I signed up last summer. The reading was also very plentiful and very dense.
On the positive side, the professor did have a sense of humor, albeit a very dry one, and a love of hypothetical examples, most memorably one where we were going to invade Bethesda (for you out-of-towners, Bethesda, Maryland is DC’s neighbor to the north) and transform it into a Greek polis. He also didn’t give us any exams, instead assigning three essays over the course of the semester, and he and I have the same first name. Still, I’m starting to rethink the idea of law as something particularly suited to my tastes.

Honors English I (TF 3:35-4:50)
This also wasn’t a class I had high hopes for, since English class hasn’t necessarily been my strong suit. Yet this class ended up being my favorite class of this semester. For one thing, there were only ten of us in the class, and we got along with each other very nicely. The reading and writing assignments were right up my alley: critical pieces concerning how we communicate and associate with each other in our modern society. And the writing assignments were probably the best ones I had out of all my classes in terms of being able to write about things that I actually was interested in writing about. The professor was very personable and a pleasure to be in class with, and always offered great suggestions and advice with our writing. And probably most unique were the workshops that we did for our first two papers, where everyone reviewed everyone else’s paper, and over a span of four classes we all offered comments and constructive criticism on each other’s papers. Maybe English wasn’t a great subject for me in high school, but I’ve certainly felt more confident in it after this past semester.

Conclusion
As far as my classes are concerned, this semester is probably going to go down as the “throwaway semester.” It was my first semester at university 4,000 miles away from home. I entered the semester having really no idea what anything in my life was going to be like, and dealt with numerous other transitions alongside these classes. And my classes this semester were all General Ed classes which primarily gave me ideas of things that I don’t want to pursue in my college career. However, I can at least take pride in getting through my first semester with satisfactory results, and hope for a much better semester when Spring 2010 rolls around.