#I'm only sad german fell to the wayside

[servuscallidus]

It's decided btw, tomorrow I'll begin to reread Julius Caesar

[realtalk-princeton]

I'm that prefrosh again. Thanks a lot to the people that answered. That makes a lot of sense, I guess I won't be interacting with admissions once I get on campus anyway. Also, because it seems like we'll be online for our first semester, does anyone have any tips of actually making this time worthwhile. I'm extremely bad at online classes and am really just not sure how to make this work. I also want to go to grad school in engineering, so I don't want to start college on a bad foot grades wise.

Response from Sulpicia:

Obviously, an online/semi-online semester will be a challenge, but it will at least be more planned out than this school year was. A letter was sent out to faculty telling them to start developing online curricula more germane to the medium, and I’m guessing that there will be more sophisticated online pedagogy than what happened when everyone was like “I guess we’re online now you have no time to prepare.” College classes are a little different than high school; you’ll probably mostly have pretaped lectures and then some sort of virtual lab session. I honestly wonder if they’ll make precepts (classes/discussion sessions) smaller bc I find that a Zoom with a few people is okay but more than like 8 really makes me lose focus. I really do believe that they’ll shift classes around and adjust things to make them more suitable for online learning, particularly after some of the cheating things that have happened this year; for example my personal hope is that classes will shift to open-book assessments and tests.

Socially I know there’s work being done to try to give you the best possible experience, although I think building relationships with people online first will always be challenging. There’s nothing set yet but you can probably expect one on one engagement with the res college staff and your RCA and different events held online. It’s really not the same, but I hope people will be able to learn from the past several months and create community spaces online.

I would not worry too much about your first semester GPA; again, every transcript will have a big mark explaining the special circumstances, and you will grow and learn so much over four years that I don’t think mediocre first-semester grades will in any way hinder your chances for grad school (my worst semester gradeswise was my first). I think so many people come in stressed about their GPAs and it’s better to give yourself permission to adjust to a totally new environment/learning style; obviously it’s not good to slack off and not try, but you will be happier and more successful if you give yourself some grace. My big advice would be to take advantage of office hours and tutoring as much as possible; that will only ever help you and is necessary in college, since instructors don’t have the bandwidth to see who’s struggling like a high school teacher does. You’re your own best advocate.

Being away from school has been really sad for me as a senior, obviously, but I think that one advantage is that it gives you time with yourself. I don’t think we really get enough time to just sit and think, or read, or do hobbies, and for me especially pretty much everything that was not school or extracurriculars fell by the wayside on campus. I feel really fortunate that I don’t have any young relatives to take care of and my parents haven’t lost work so I don’t have some of the challenges at home that a lot of people face. But I’ve been taking a lot of my spare time and reading books I always wanted to, or trying new things that I couldn’t on campus, in an attempt to make this time “worth it” for me.