<p>Don’t be too intimidated by the other students. Prior programming experience certainly helps, but it’s not as big of a deal as you might think, and once you get into your upper division courses, you’ll pretty much be on equal footing with the other students.</p>
<p>In my career, I’ve worked with software engineers who boast about having started programming when they were 10 years old or whatever, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their spaghetti code.</p>
<p>Why not just figure out what language your Object Oriented Programming course is using and learn that in advance? To prepare yourself for the optimization class, you could brush up on your linear algebra (for linear optimization) and your calculus (for nonlinear).</p>