OP post +1
Once I got over the initial away-from-home shock of suddenly and definitively being a supposed independent adult - and a kind rabble rouser came and almost physically dragged me from moping in my room down to the bar* - it kicked seven shades out of school.
Well, until the actual work and poverty side of it kicked in of course. But it quickly becomes your reality, you learn how to cope with that alongside all the everyday things you have to do, and there is still time for social stuff.
Try not to waste it, and always get the work in FIRST. There will be time for funs after (if not, then you may have a workload or learning-disorder** problem that you need to chat to a tutor about... don't worry, at least 60% of them are human). But putting the funs in first may mean you get carried away and have no time left for work, and no-one wants to be a dropout. A part time job may also be an idea.
I have a feeling college now - rather than back in 2000 (omg so old now
) when I started - may be better again, thanks largely to ubiquitous cellphones, internet and social networking. People are on the whole less bitchy than at school (those who are, just ignore; they should get the message when enough people freeze them out) so less cyber-bullying issues, but keeping in touch effectively - with friends, groupwork partners, tutors - was always the problem when few people had cells, there were no landlines in dorms, net access was mostly limited to webcafes, scattered shared access rooms or a bank of ancient email terminals in the library, and the only thing resembling a social network was Usenet, Friends Reunited, and the college's own creaky messageboards (online and real-world). Nowadays there's little excuse.
Don't worry about the talking to people thing. Unless you've got terrible personal hygiene issues or crazy makeup/body jewellery (all simple to fix...), or are starting out on some very wierd conversational footings, chances are at this stage they're just as dazed and spaced by this whole experience as you are, and maybe just needing a bit more time to adjust. Be general, be friendly, and lean more towards inquisitive than forcing opinions on people. They respond more if asked appropriate leading (and gradually more general) questions. Effective conversation is largely the art of listening to people, particularly in groups of 3 or more, where it's what you'll be doing the majority of the time, and of knowing how to ask the right questions rather than particularly telling stories. Not that a good storyteller isn't occasionally welcome on an uninspired winter evening...
* Yay for an 18+ drinking age. In the UK we don't have - or need - frats and soros. We have the pub, or if it comes to it, the dorm site bar, to serve most of the same purposes, and the various clubs and societies taking up the slack. It also gets rid of some of the cliqueyness between different houses, and dodges some of the jock vs nerd problems (that, and a general lack of sports scholarships/inter-college championships... you're there on academic merit, your sporting prowess is your own business but there are few completely unathletic students). Everyone's quite well mixed in together.
** I say that in the nicest, most constructive possible way. I was diagnosed with something along those lines much later on, and I wish I'd had even the slightest inkling, even someone mentioning the possibility on a forum like this, to provoke me into going and asking a councellor about it, rather than just assuming the work was extra hard, and I was a bit too stupid. They certainly didn't go out of their way to suggest people go see them. It needed a random, observant tutor on a much less important vocational course to notice I was having difficulty finishing certain pieces of work on time (ones challenging to those with my supposed problem) and suggest I have an assessment... which came out with high scores for pretty much everything, and single-digit percentile for the critical component, holding everything else up. It's not always a simple case of "Learning Difficulty = Downs Syndrome OR Dyslexia (= Can't Read or Write Worth A Damn)", there's a whole spectrum of stuff within Dyslexia *alone* before you get on to all the others.
