Slightly off topic I suppose, but makmanalp is making an AWESOME point here. No one knows you and it's your chance to get out and do what you really want to. I was in the closet for all of high school and fairly miserable because at the time I thought my friends would stop hanging around me should they find out. This fear kept me from making a lot of new friends in my first year, especially since one of my friends from high school was my roommate. It kept me from joining the GBLT club which would have made my transition to university much easier, and let me interact with more people like me.

This is your chance to meet new people who have the same interests as you. Changing from a high school where very few people are interested in technology to a college where your entire program is filled with people who share your same general interests creates an awesome environment to grow and share ideas. The group of friends you meet in classes the first year can lead to an awesome experience in the second year, as you find people who you work well and agree with who will want to be roommates in later years. Can anyone say hacker house?

You might ( won't say will) end up in business with those people too!

Agreed, although it's easier to reinvent oneself shortly after college (in my experience) than in college.

Socially, college is very similar to high school. Real life is radically different. In some ways, it's worse. In others, it's better.

I think the best social experience can be had in late college, when you're old and mature enough to reject the bullshit (hookups, binge drinking, gossip) and still surrounded by brilliant, interesting people. My hope is that the OP will be wise enough to skip to this phase, which is "late college" for most of us, much earlier than the rest of us did.

College provides you great opportunities to meet fascinating people, if you're wise about how you do things; if you're not, you just end up expensively wasting time.