Start Strong 🗣️🗣️

Some advice I found on here a while ago that really helped me out in my first semester, whoever wrote it deleted the comment so I can’t link it but here it is :)

Start strong. If you can kick ass in your first semester, you will feel confident and motivated for the second. If you do well in the second, you keep the momentum going into the third, and the fourth, etc.

The way to start strong is not to underestimate anything. Assume everything is difficult and will require a lot of work (even if it's not true). Try to give your honest to god 100% in the first semester. Do every single homework assignment, go to every lecture, every lab, study your ass off for every test, try to get A+ on everything. Why? Because that way you will find out what it really takes and how bad it can get. Even if it turns out to be a huge mountain to climb for you, it's only 4 months. You can give 100% for 4 months. And it might turn out to be easier than you thought.

After that, you reassess. Do you want to be an A student? Do you have other priorities? But the important thing is that you do everything you can to find the baseline, how much actual time, work and stress does it take for you to do well. You don't have to keep busting ass if you don't want to, but there's huge value in doing it at least once, and best case right at the start.

tl;dr: it's way easier to start out strong and keep it going (or start strong and taper down) than start out weak and make up for it later. Do future you a favour and bust ass now so that if in the future you have to neglect studies for some unforeseen problems, you have a strong GPA, network and study habits to carry you through the hard times.
A mistake a lot of people make is starting out weak. They underestimate the amount of work required to do well, or they don't care and think they can make up for it later. They accumulate bad grades, they miss out on knowledge required to do well in their more advanced classes that they'll have to make up for. They accumulate a lot of debt for slacking off in the beginning, and when the bill is eventually due they burn out.