the title says it all.
Except for a few LAC’s there will be no one to remind you of deadlines nor will there be anyone to nudge you to do the work.
I wish I had purchased a miniature tablet earlier - I spent my first semester printing out all of my readings (sorry trees) and it was so expensive (I blew through my “free pages” print allotment by the third week.) Christmas of that year, I was given an iPad Mini by my parents. I started using it to keep PDFs of course readings as well as e-textbooks. I found it to be tremendously efficient in a lot of ways. My only complaint is that I have one of the earliest models of the iPad Mini and it doesn’t hold a charge very well (battery can often lose 10+% in the course of me just scrolling through a single reading) so it isn’t that great for long term (4+ hours) studying.
You’d be surprised how much easier your college experience will be if you’re just open/honest about everything and proactive. There’s no shame in admitting that something confuses you; seeing a tutor, TA, or professor’s office hours isn’t a sign of defeat. Defeat is giving up on your learning. Defeat isn’t using everything at your disposal to improve your understanding of a subject. As someone who has both seen a tutor and as someone who tutors, I cannot recommend the experience enough.
Smile at people. Talk to people. Say hi to them in the hallway. I spent my freshman year burdened by this idea that being cheery was “awkward” so I kind of just kept to myself and only talked to my close friends. Starting last semester, I began just striking up conversations with people around me. I said hi to people I recognized in the hallway. I asked people to hangout with my friends and I. This has enriched my social experience exponentially.
Know who you are. Peer pressure is a real thing; don’t surround yourself with people who don’t share the same values that you do. I dropped a group of friends the beginning of my first semester of college because I couldn’t really identify with their behavior. It was difficult because there’s a real fear of being alone, but I just had to keep reminding myself that there was over 15,000 people at my school and I can make new friends. You are your own person. You have your own morals and principles. Don’t get caught up in the crowd just because you think that there’s no one out there who is nothing like you. My two closest friends share a lot of the same values and ambitions as I do and it really motivates me to improve myself and help my friends improve. HOWEVER, this isn’t to say that you should only befriend people who are EXACTLY like you - my friends are diverse in their ideas about the world - they’re only similar in core values (honesty, generosity, etc.) In fact, my two closest friends are on either end of the political spectrum (staunch conservative and very left-wing liberal.) It makes for very lively debates, lol.
Don’t go into it with expectations of the kind of college experience you see on TV, or in movies, or on college brochures (though my campus does look like a brochure right now – everyone broke out the Frisbees when it hit 70 degrees). One of my high school friends who also had a bit of a rough adjustment to college told me he thought having a happy college experience “wasn’t for everyone,” and that was just about the saddest thing I’d ever heard. I’ve learned to manage my expectations so that pining after something that’s not real (the ~perfect~ school, the ~perfect~ life) doesn’t bring me down.
Knock out your major classes first so you can qualify for internships later. Then do your general education classes senior year. They will soften your difficult senior classes, and put you in classes with the opposite sex, so you can flirt when you are nearing graduation. Oh, you can flirt as freshmen too, but you have less to impress with then.
Take 12 units per semester instead of 15. Get better grades, and network with the extra time. Get a little work experience. No need to worry about being set back a year. Get plenty of sleep and enjoy college. Most students will fail classes and fall behind a year regardless. It is far better to get the good GPA you can display on your resume.
I just wish I had better prepared myself for how tough it was going to be. I transferred from a community college to USC and yikes, things sure went up several notches. When my grade in an introductory linguistics class/GE is lower than my grade in a computer science class, you know something is wrong 
I got a high B on the first CS midterm compared to a low C (probably even a D) on the first ling midterm. I’ve raised my grade up to a point where I’ll get a low B (I only missed like half a point on the second ling midterm), but yeah, I wish I better prepared myself mentally for the transition in difficulty.