Many people think that one of the important things English courses and English teachers do is help people write more conventional, well-documented, nicely formatted term papers. I think this is a nice thing for you to be able to do for the three or four years you're in school -- but I recently read an article which referred to the skill as one you needed to master in order never to have to do it again. Writing term papers just isn't done outside of school situations.
Two things can be said quickly about this: one is that carefully and thoroughly learning a particular form for term papers and essays is a waste of time, because they vary so widely from discipline to discipline and professor to professor -- but it is not a waste of time to learn how important such conventions are, and how to learn and follow them. Many folks come to university thinking that writing is writing, and if it's "good" it's follows a clear set of rules. This isn't so. Writing email is different from writing a report on your reading; writing a text message is different from writing a job application; writing an argument for one course of action as opposed to another is different from writing a summary of an essay, or a paper on a novel. All of these not only require different forms (from headings and layout on the page, to documentation style), they also require different choices of words and sentence structure and tone. Learning how to make choices among these various forms is very much like learning a language -- or, maybe a better analogy, like learning manners. Manners that are appropriate at dinner at the Lieutenant Governor's house aren't appropriate at home, or in the cafeteria, or at McDonald's. How do we learn those things? It's clear we don't learn them by being given one set of rules and told to remember them. We learn by finding out how to watch other people, see what's acceptable and effective and what's not.
In my courses, then, you won't get "practice at essays." You'll get many opportunities to write in various situations and for different readings, with different purposes, and to see how other people do the same thing -- and to see what works and what doesn't. There will be informal writing like emails and there'll be more extended and thoughtful writing like reading logs and learning reflections and there'll be more formal, edited public writing, which will go on the Web or be printed as public documents. You'll have occasions to learn how to document your work and how to refer to the work of others.
What there won't be are essays written on assignment and corrected and marked by the teacher, and thrown in the trash as soon as possible.
At the end, you'll have had a better chance to know about formal writing, and to be a skilled learner in new writing situations, than anyone who's merely had a course in essay writing.