Actual computer science

Looking back a couple of years when I was taking CS in collage a couple of things that came in very useful where:

Be comfortable on a shell prompt, while some stuff you do will be in an honest IDE there is a lot of stuff that you will do on the old command line. Also playing around with programming for a command line is far easier to get the basics down than programming for a gui.

Learn git, its not hard and version management is your best friend and will save you more than you think.

Get comfortable on a text editor, a real text editor like vim, emacs, sublime text, notepad++ or a hundred others. There will be stuff in collage that will not have an IDE and being reasonable with one will lower your stress. The last thing you need is to have an assembler project due and having to fight your editor.

As far as languages go, you will end up working in a bunch of them. C or C++ are a good choice for learning, python is ok. I prefer go (https://golang.org) its closer to C and I feel it is more readable than python. Though in all honesty any imperative or mixed language would be fine. Try some of the Project Euler (https://projecteuler.net) questions, read the docs, kitbash, have some fun. Redo all the stuff you did in the java class in another language, write a queue from scratch etc... Though I would think twice about trying out any functional language at this point, the school will almost certainly start you out with an object oriented language and that can be hard enough to grok the first time around even without the influence of a very different school of thought.

Lastly I would lean heavily on your family and friends that are already in related industries. Get a feel for what the various jobs that you could end up with and find out what you like or don't. There are a lot of related jobs that are looking more for the easier Computer Information style degree than the much more math based Computer Science. If those are the types of jobs that you are striving for, look into that course set instead of the higher profile cs.

 

I think this is the best advice given here. There is nothing worse than having to work in something you find boring/uninteresting. Also starting with C/C++ as first language is a mistake, you will get a lot of bad habits from it since it gives you so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

Even though it's an old language (and it is not used much) Pascal is the best starting language after all it was created to teach programming (I guess modern equivalent is Java/C#),. Since it's very structured (unlike C/C++) if forces you to organize your thoughts. Jumping to C/C++ from Pascal/Java/C# is easy. If you want something weird that will really expand your brain try programming in FORTH, it will either break you or you will reach enlightenment.

Just be grateful you NEVER have to program in COBOL. Barf.