I agree with AscoreD, the trick is looking at the demands of the courses you have selected.
IMPO, many freshman do not understand that even if you are in all AP's in HS it is not a 10th of what it is like in college. The pace is faster and you can be in classes with 250+ people. They move on with you or without you. Engineering especially.
If you know you have hard courses and ROTC, not only float in the electives that may be easier, but also be smart on scheduling the classes. Too often kids will try to work their schedule to have one day off and one day with just one class, leaving 3 days of hard core long days.
This is an issue because if you load T/TH with 3 classes, and have ROTC on those days, 0 on Monday and 2 on W/F done by noon, you will hit the wall because people are procrastinators. You will not spend Friday afternoon getting ready for Tuesday classes, instead you will have fun the whole weekend and come Monday at 3 do HW for T/TH. Which means after a long day on Tuesday you have to come back home and do work for the W/F class. You are so busy doing W/F that when you come home on Wed you are doing T/TH homework, same is true for the Thursday for the Friday class. Come Friday you are burnt and you take down time for yourself, bringing us back to repeating the cycle.
We have 2 kids in college and both did this in their freshman yr. I advised them this was not smart, smiled when they disagreed with me and did it anyway. Both learned and have never repeated it again, one has worked it for Wed as their day off. When they did the scheduling to cram up their schedule believing they would study, it was their lowest gpa in their college career by at least 0.2 gpa, for AFROTC in your 1st 3 semesters that will hurt alot. Overall DS class of 12 has a 3.387, it would have been over 3.4 if he did schedule correctly because that 1 semester was 3.192.
OBTW, he was merit(college) on top of AFROTC scholarship. He was placed on probation by the college for that 3.192 because they do not round up to the tenth, they round up to the 100th. They also do not do cgpa, but sem. gpa.
He fell under the 3.2 they placed, he was Dean's list with 3.645 the semester prior.
Check with the college if they are taking merit. Read the fine print from the college. We didn't, we assumed, and you all know what ASSUME means.