First Week of University

I've been waiting a long time to get here, but now, am I second guessing myself?

Cramming, gotta get that good stuff in

     For those that read some of my recent posts about frosh, you should know that students had a choice to either stay for the frosh events or attend classes. I asked around (espeically asking senior students) whether or not to stay at frosh or just skip the first day of lectures. All the answers I got were on either side, but I guess since I'm paying over seven grand for school versus fifty bucks for frosh, I'll attend my lectures instead.

     And I'm glad I made that decision because the first day of classes in university is nothing like high school. But let's start off with the similarities, the professor will take half the class to introduce himself or herself and their respective accomplishments and go through the course outline. Okay, I guess it's nothing different so far, but after introductions we jumped right into the lecture and textbook material and I guess this is where the two diverge. In high school, we would've probably been holding hands and singing kumbaya for an entire week before we start any course material. I guess my blog will soon look like one of my fellow blogger colleagues, DWei's.

"Hold hands and singing kumbaya", a favorite quote from one of my high school teachers

     Now another difference is that in class, you should never run out of things to do (and that one thing is to listen). And that's another difference, there is no "in-class homework", you literally sit in class for 2-3 hours and there is no time allotted in class to do any readings or homework. Another note is that you have to be prepared going to class, that means note taking devices, textbook readings, printouts etc...because no one is going to remind you or bug you about this stuff. Well it's not that I had any trouble in high school with any of this but it's pretty overwhelming when you have to keep track of tutorial dates, readings that need to be done, quizzes, online assessments... And I'm sure the lists goes on, but phew, I'm just in first year.
 
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How was your first week of university or post secondary education? How is it different from high school?

University Course Selection

Over the course of the week, I've been stressing over possible elective courses I can take for my first year in university. With course selection starting tomorrow, I'm stressing even more than ever!

UTSC (University of Toronto Scarborough Campus)

The way my university does course selection is through an online program called ROSI (Repository of Student Information). Students are allowed to start their course selection on a certain date at a certain time, and these times and dates will differ for every student by years (1st year, 2nd year...).

When I went for an event called "Get Started" they stressed that students must immediately finalize and choose their courses right at their allotted time, but they didn't elaborate why. So I decided to converse with some current UTSC students. Well first off, if you don't take advantage of your allotted time, you risk the chance of not getting the courses and times you prefer, but most importantly, ROSI is notorious for being down due to an overload on its servers.

Okay, so I basically have to be really prompt for my scheduled time, but now for the courses themselves, albeit I only get 2 electives for my first year. The reason I'm stressing over these two courses is because of bell curving, something all University of Toronto campuses are infamous for, so I really want to take courses that wouldn't put a dent in my GPA while at the same time, hold my interest.

Right now, I have a few courses picked out such as EESA06 (Introduction to Planet Earth), GGRA02 (The Geography of Global Processes),  GGRA03 (Cities and Environments)

I do not own or take credit for all of the above images , if you would like them to be taken down, please message me.

Any suggestions?
How was your first year's studies for post-secondary institutions? What kind of courses did you take?