Miss anything from my high school years? Only the social aspect of it but other than that I really loved the freedom and having more control of my life. I would actually hate to go back to the K-12 format.
Since your college situation and your college experiences will greatly vary from mine, I will only try to stick to general points that I find to be useful in most situations.
Register for your classes early. Think about what you want to take and also what you need to graduate. A little bit of planning can help go a long way. You don't have to follow your plans exactly as is, but it will make your life a bit easier. Registering early also allows you to pick classes you want to take, at the ideal times, and with the ideal professors. Don't like 7am classes? You can control that as many classes have multiple times and days of the week. How do you learn about ideal professors? Visit
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ where you can look up professors from your college and view feedback posted by other students. Of course not every professor will be on here or they may have little feedback and because other students wrote these, you also have to take things with a grain of salt to. They generally turn out to be reliable from my experience though and can save you from a potentially bad professor or one who will give you a hard time even if you are doing everything you're supposed to do.
Try not pile up all your general education classes in your freshman and sophomore year and take your major classes in your junior and senior years. This is bad because the moment you feel committed to a major you should try to get as many years of proficiency at it as possible. The other reason is you don't wanna pile a bunch of hard classes into one semester and should try to have a mix of both easy and hard classes in all your semesters so the difficulty remains roughly the same. Not always possible, but you can make an attempt. This is especially important if you have GPA requirements to maintain for scholarships, financial aid, or just want to make honors society / dean's list for consistently high GPAs. A really tough semester can bring in a lot of stress, discourage you, and bring your cumulative GPA down severely. Classes that aren't as difficult will seem more difficult because you are stressed about a lot of difficult classes simultaneously. Have your semesters in manageable chunks.
If you can, try to get your textbooks as cheap as possible. There are many sites that can help with this such as
https://www.cheapesttextbooks.com/. I would generally avoid the school bookstore as they will not only rip you off in how much the book costs, but also when you go back to sell the book again. It is of course more convenient than buying/selling/renting online though and one advantage to the bookstore is you can actually look through the used textbooks and see the notes/highlights/annotations other students before made. This can make studying easier and you wouldn't be able to preview inside used books online to see if the notes from the previous student were sufficient. If possible, see if your professor also allows older editions of a book. Older editions usually don't change and because they aren't the newest, they can be significantly cheaper.
I would also suggest you try not to finish in four years. There is no rush to getting your degree on time. Rushing adds stress and when things don't go to plan you will also be more likely to break down. Take your time as college is not a race and is also rather expensive so this can help your wallet to. An employer isn't going to hire you any faster for getting your degree sooner than later nor will they ask how long it took you to get it.
Hope this helps.
