The courses that have come as the greatest surprise to me have been the gen ed courses I've been required to take. Last semester I took an I-Series course about earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanos, which I expected to be pretty technical and out of my scope. The course turned out to be really interesting to me, and I was able to understand most of the material with relative ease. Similarly, this semester I'm taking an environmental policy class which is not related to my major in any way, but has turned out to be really interesting and I've been learning about policy that dictates things around me which I would've never known about otherwise. Finding these courses was easy, I looked through the schedule of classes for courses that fulfill gen ed credits I need, and signed up for courses that seemed interesting.
I haven't really made any relationships with any of the faculty at the university while being here, beside occasional questions after class. I have, however, talked to many of my TAs and utilized them to get help with the coursework and material for my classes. Most of my TAs have been extremely knowledgeable on the course material and are often better at explaining concepts than the professors themselves. It's easiest to make relationships with TAs or faculty by just asking questions or talking to them.
Making friends definitely made it easier to adjust to the university. Coming in, everybody here was friendly and willing to talk to and meet people, so it was easy to make lots of acquaintances early on. As the year continued, I kept making friends by just talking to people whenever I was out and about, especially while skateboarding because other skaters will skate with you and just hang out. The greatest obstacle in pursuing all of these relationships is keeping in touch and up to date with everybody, as it's easy to make lots of acquaintances, but hard to find the time to keep in touch with all of them, especially if your schedules don't line up. I think I've been pretty lucky in that I formed a tight knit group of friends pretty early on and I spend most of my time with them, which makes it much easier to handle being in such a different environment. The best way to make the best use of connections is to make as many friends as possible so you can narrow down people that you're most comfortable with and similar to.
The biggest part of university that I wasn't prepared for was definitely finals. During high school it was easy to learn the material for a few weeks and kind of let it fade away in memory once you were done with that unit, as well as starting to slack off as the semester came to a close and work wasn't as important. This is entirely different in college because of finals, I had to re-teach myself everything that I had learned for all of my classes and prepare for a big exam worth around 20% of my grade for each class. I can no longer slack off and tune out new material around the end of the semester because I need to continue to learn so I can both retain the information for following years, and so I can get a good grade in the class overall. Incoming freshmen should take good notes throughout the semester and take note of information that is important for finals, like big/important ideas and concepts, and practice these things early on.