Horrible first year GPA...really need advice and study tips

To be honest, if you get those kind of grades, you can be in real trouble trying to continue in engineering. Many of the courses you listed are meant to weed people out of the College of Engineering altogether. Then you are going to have to deal with courses meant to weed people out of specific engineering majors, and then again out of specialties within a major. The weeding just never stops, and as people drop out, the grade distribution doesn’t get better by that much. Your classes are only going to get harder.