One of you three will not be in engineering this time next year. Heard that in my first seminar class in engineering as a freshman at Purdue 30 years ago.
In contrast my daughter recently visited the University of Iowa. We were told explicitly that that is no longer the practice. They had about 20 students all indicate that they are on track to graduate in 4 years. My daughter was sold.
As far as getting up to speed in math. I am sorry but it is very difficult to pack all the math you should have learned in High School into an engineering curriculum. This is why most schools have a pretty stringent math aptitude expectation for admission. They have to. Ability in math comes from doing problems (this is also true for the analytical side of engineering). You cannot get around that fact. At the end of the day it is about you and the math problem - not a group huge activity with your friends. Study sessions together can be useful but having a tutor is even better. You don't just do the math problems that were assigned. You do every one that you have time for and for which you have a solution (or a tutor to guide you).
Really making solutions widely available to problems is the best way to learn math (and the analytical portion of engineering). I actively seek out Instructor's Solution Manuals for my daughters' courses. I find it humorous that they say they are for instructor's use only. Properly used that are the best preparation tool for math, science, and engineering. It is not about copying the answer for a few points of homework credit. It is about decoding what is actually being asked (sometimes math books are pretty obtuse) and dealing with those nagging exception problems that are not addressed in the text (Larson Algebra/Trig is notorious for this).
I remember when I was in school. We did not have nearly the level of resources available for learning. I would expect that engineering students today are far better than we were in my time. You can watch lectures for most courses in the first two years of an engineering program.
The most important to remember is that you should be spending at least 3 hours for every hour you are in class (college is a 50-60 hour job).
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