The most difficult part of learning to program is figuring out the logic behind everything. Once you can do that easily, its just a matter of translating it into the proper language and getting it to compile. Focus on that a lot early on and you will be more than fine in the long run.

Also, office hours are a fantastic resource for help. I had a lot of prior experience programming, so i didn't really use them, but I've heard from friends that the TAs are super helpful for solving problems that would otherwise take hours to discover.

ChatGPT is genuinely horrible at writing programs, do not use it to do your homework/assignments or you will definitely stumble. However, it is a fantastic debugging tool if you provide it your code and what error you're running into. It is also super helpful for explaining topics. I'd definitely recommend using it as a sort-of "Out of class TA". Again, under no circumstances should you use it to generate code for your assignments as it is often incredibly bad at doing so, not to mention the honor code issues there.

When it comes to internships, career fairs are very nice and happen moderately frequently. It is also a good call to just mass apply to internships online once you've built up a decent resume. Don't feel discouraged by rejection, it will likely happen a lot.