One of the biggest surprises for me was the course cmsc250. Even though I knew math is used in computer science, I never believed that the two topics were very interrelated. The math I thought of included algebra, geometry, calculus, etc. Clearly, I would not think we needed to know how to find the area under a surface when writing code right? The course cmsc250 showed me that upper-level math is beyond computing a problem. Most of the problems I dealt with were proving specific statements to be true. Some were as trivial as proving that an odd number cubed is always odd. My advice to freshman would be to redo some of the lecture problems on your own. After you do some practice on your own, you will be much more comfortable with obscure material.
Although I was not able to really interact with faculty members that much due to the nature of online school, I was able to interact with some of the TAs for my classes. It is not hard to interact with faculty members, however. In the few encounters I have had with Tas, they were all positive. If you are respectful, the faculty members will happily assist you. They are all very approachable.
If I am completely honest, I did make any new friends at all during this semester. I usually ended up watching the recorded lectures instead of going to live lecture. So, the other students in my class did not make any major difference in my learning. This however would be much different if I were in person. One way to make connections is to form study groups within the class. With online classes, people still try to form groups to study. Each class usually has a GroupMe chat where students help each other. By forming groups, you can make friends while improving your mastery of the material because you can help each other learn.
One of the classes that I am taking, Comm107, was significantly different from my expectations. For this class, I would record all my presentations on Zoom, rather than giving it live. I found this unusual because that would essentially take away from the entire purpose of the class. In person, you would only have one chance to get the speech correctly. On the computer, I can just rerecord until I get it perfectly. Even though the class in much easier, I felt like the purpose of the class was defeated. Other than that, all my classes are normal.
One of the things I was not as prepared for was distributing my workload. In college, you are always thrown with quizzes, projects, homework basically every week. In high school, most of the work is done in the class, so homework load is not as much. For some of the memoizable based classes, I felt like I relied too much on my notes for the exams and quizzes. This is most likely common knowledge, but do not procrastinate on assignments, especially major ones.