College work obviously carries more weight than that of high school and, with midterms approaching, the first-year students at Champlain College have gotten a good taste of the heavier workload that college has to offer.
“My robot assignment [was the hardest]. I hadn’t done anything like it before and it took me the most amount of time. I had to make ten robot silhouettes from scratch, they couldn’t be based on anything they had to be from my own creativity and then I had to flesh one of them out making a silhouette into a front view a side view and then a three-quarter view in full shading,” said Game Art and Animation major, Leanna Russell.
Russell said that although high school did help prepare her for college, it was nothing compared to her first semester at Champlain. “My hardest assignment I had in high school was probably from AP Art. But that was weekly, and I didn’t have only four days to do an entire project.”
Criminal Law major Abi Sesay is also starting to feel the pressure. Her hardest assignment was an essay for her criminal law class. “Having to do a paper in the span of five days and having it be a nine-page paper was a bit of a struggle and a shock for me,” said Sesay
While Russell and Sesay are concerned with time constraints, Professional Writing major Sarah Wasik was set back with the diversity college courses include. “For my Intro to Professional Writing class, I had to get an interview from someone in the writing profession, and I found that very difficult because journalism isn’t really my forte and I didn’t expect that to be an actual assignment that I would have to do. I’m also just really shy and not good at grabbing opportunities like that with people, but it turned out okay at the end. It was just nerve-wracking,” said Wasik.
Computer Science major Ralph Drake, on the other hand, has breezed through his first few weeks of college. “I haven’t had any difficult assignments so far. The computer science major is really easy. I don’t think it’ll get harder until sophomore year.”
Drake credits this easiness to prior learning experiences. “I worked full-time over the summer in a programming job so I already know pretty much everything that they cover in the first two CS courses,” he said.
The first-years have been working hard to find methods to deal with any and all assignments that may be thrown at them. “I give myself rewards that I only get after I’m done with my work, like if I get a paper done, I can watch a YouTube video I really wanted to watch before I started,” said Russell.
“I go to the library so there are less distractions and I listen to 'Six Inch' by Beyoncé to remind myself that if I want to succeed, I need to grind,” said Sesay.
Marianna Messana, another game art and animation major has a different way to motivate herself, “I have to say to myself that I paid a lot of money to be here and that I’m wasting my money if I don’t [do work].”
The first years were all in agreement that college is different than high school because now they actually have to put thought into their assignments, but that Champlain College had a great system of easing them into the college workload.
