Throughout your whole high school career, teachers will tell you that university professors are not going to care about you and that you are going to have to learn things by yourself. So far, that’s a lie. During my first couple of weeks in university, my professors have been incredibly welcoming and supportive. Most professors know and understand that the workload difference between high school and university is massive. It seems to me that they try to make it so we can adapt to the changes easily and comfortably.
High school is very helpful in preparing you for university. It shows you different learning techniques, writing techniques and studying techniques so you can learn what works best for you. From my experience, the most important thing I learned and practiced throughout high school was how to properly cite sources and not plagiarise. Academic honesty is a huge contributing factor in academic writing. Since teachers were very strict about plagiarism and cheating on assignments, it’s now a habit for me to always credit other’s work.
The one big difference that I have noticed is the amount of freedom you have in assignments. In high school, the assignment’s rubric was descriptive and specific about what you had to do and how to do it. In university, you can choose how you want to write assignments and use the best learning techniques that work for you. Although the freedom you have is enjoyable, you do have to make sure to stay on task and up to date with your work since you don’t have a teacher reminding you what to do all the time. The strictness in the assignments made them not enjoyable and tedious to do but also made them easier. Having the outline and rubric for the assignment felt limiting but also assuring. Maybe it’s just because I am a first-year and I am excited to be in university, but my assignments have been interesting to do.
In high school, you must take required classes about subjects you’re not really interested in. For example, why would you want to take a science class when you want to learn more about English and poetry? You don’t, but you must do it to get enough credits to graduate. In university, there’s the freedom to choose your classes and learn what you want knowing that it will help you in the future. It is a choice to be here which makes learning fun and exciting.
Hi Bruna, I really enjoyed your blog! As you said in the blog, when we were in secondary school there was an assignment’s rubric, and basically we should have done essays and assignments along with it.
Another thing I sympathize with is that we had to study subjects that we didn’t like in high school. I think elementally, middle, and secondary schools are in the “preparation stage” for those who wants go to university, so I think they have to study in general. And, as you said in your blog, at university we can specialize in the areas we want to study.
Just my thoughts, I’ve been playing music since I was little, and some of my friends have gone to music school from high school. Not limited to music, I think it is good for people who want to specialize in what they like and what they are good at, and people who want to get such a job in the future, to study toward those goals from an early stage.
Hi Bruna!
I completely agree with your point about universities offering more flexibility on assignments and on course selections. I also thought it was just me being an over-excited first year, but I also have found most of my assignments and classes to be really interesting because we have so much freedom to choose and to take courses on subjects we are passionate about. You also make a good point about high school preparing us for university by teaching us about plagiarism and citing others’ work. I think of my high school as a stepping stone — this is definitely something that varies from school to school, but I think my high school experience only really taught me the basics of when to cite, not necessarily how to do it properly. I’m sure that this is something that will come with time for me, but I think this is something that should be valued in all high schools, as citation is a vital skill in university.
-Emma
Hi Bruna! Thank you for saying that your profs have been welcoming so far! I’ve heard high school teachers tell their students that “no one will help you” at university and I really feel that is not true!! CAP is a special environment, of course, but I like to think that most university instructors do want to help their students 🙂