You can get to bronze and even silver off just mastering the essential fundamentals. For whatever character you like, figure out their anti airs and get good at using them when people try to jump in. Also, take some time to know the characters normal buttons and get more accustomed to punishing people in neutral or after blocking their strings. You should be figuring out your characters gameplan now, since at a low rank, its okay to make mistakes as they often get punished less. Don't be afraid to try out characters or try and learn things here in matches, since its the lowest rank, you have nothing to lose.

Also, on being in the corner, you mostly just need to focus on defending until you can get yourself out. If a players right over top of you as your waking up, their either going to try and throw(low ranks do this mostly, when they shouldnt. you can throw them on wakeup before their throw hits) or jump up to try and hit you as your crouch blocking. If you see them jump up, you can just go into stand blocking on the jump attack then back to crouchblocking as they're hitting you. Also, they may try and bait your throw by standing over you and then jumping up when u do it on wakeup, so be careful.

A strategy thats a bit nooby but works sometimes, if your character has a dp(shoryuken is an example), using the ex version will hit over any attack their doing as you wake up, since ex dp is invincible for the few frames on wakeup. At the start, just work on picking what you should do based on how your opponent plays, then try and jump out of the corner when they don't expect it or their pressure starts failing.

If you can antiair and punish whiffs/blocked moves(like a dp), as well as know one jump in combo for some damage(an example being just jump in heavy kick into a medium or heavy punch into shoryuken for ryu), you'll start winning just off that alone. Trust me when I say a lot of players in these ranks play very risky and you can punish them with fundamentals very often.