Zero to Hero

Freshman year

3 min read · by progsu team · updated August 22, 2026

freshman year

Foundations and exploration. This is the year to actually learn the material and figure out what you like, so aim higher than just surviving the semester.

focus

Go deep on your fundamentals instead of rushing to specialize. You don’t need to know yet whether you want web dev, ML, security, or something else. Most people figure that out over the next year or two, and almost nobody figures it out in their first semester. So go to office hours, form a study group, and actually understand your intro classes instead of just passing them. That foundation is what everything else gets built on.

If you want to aim for an internship this year too, go for it. Plenty of freshmen apply, and going through the process is real practice for next time (even a career fair pitch that goes nowhere, or an application that gets rejected). But if you don’t land one, that’s completely normal and it doesn’t mean you’re behind. Most people land their first internship sophomore year or later. If it doesn’t happen this year you’ve still got real options = research with a professor, one of the few structured programs still built for this stage, a co-op, a hackathon project, or just shipping something on your own. Building experience early walks through each one, and any of them builds real, usable experience.

classes to prioritize

Roughly what a first year looks like for most CS majors, with GSU course codes included so you can map it onto your own schedule:

  • intro to computer science I and II (GSU: CSC 1301, CSC 1302), the sequence everything else builds on. Don’t just pass it, actually understand it.
  • calculus I and II (GSU: MATH 2211, MATH 2212), or precalculus first (GSU: MATH 1113) if you’re not placed into calculus yet

Discrete math and data structures usually come next year, so don’t stress about them yet.

how to step it up

Build something outside of class and put it on GitHub, even something small. It doesn’t need to be impressive, it just needs to be yours and finished. If you’re going for an internship too, start early. Go to career fairs (even just for the reps), put together a real resume, see Resume guide, and get applications in during the fall. A lot of internship pipelines run on a rolling basis, so being early matters more than being polished. If nothing lands this cycle, keep building and go again next year with more to show for it.

where to go next