In Calc 1 there is honestly very little memorization, it's mostly grasping conceptually what you're doing. Nowadays and especially in OP's case (being in community college), he is more likely to be allowed to use a calculator at least at first, which means no need for memorization at all beyond a few basic properties. It's Calc 2 where you start relying more heavily on memorizing properties because there are simply more variants.
@IronMike if you completed precalc, you should be fine. The major issue for you will be that it has been a long time since your last math class. You will want to refresh your memory by looking over some basic trigonometric properties (how the functions interrelate). Here is a cheat sheet for that, along with some more advanced ones you probably won't use for a while:
http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/pdf/Trig_Cheat_Sheet.pdf
In your first two courses of calculus, nearly everything you will learn can be found in these 11 pages:
http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/pdf/Calculus_Cheat_Sheet_All.pdf
That's really all that you will ever need to "know" in your whole first year of calculus, and most of it is plug-and-chug properties and "fill in the blank" skills.
What I think will help you mentally prepare for calculus the most is recognizing that it is simply a different type of math than anything you've done before. You learn new functions. An analogy would be when you learned multiplication after having mastered addition. Finding the integral and derivative of a function, on a mechanical level, are the same thing. Your professor will likely explain to you how limits are central to calculus in one of your earliest lectures, and I think that is the most important element to understand. Once you have conceptually grasped the fundamentals of analyzing curves, you will start to see applications for calculus everywhere, especially in your field. This course may be one of the most important ones you will take in order to have a conceptual foundation for all future calculus as well as some material science courses, so try to stay on top of the conceptual elements. If you don't slack off and distribute small study sessions before bed every day, you will have an easier time grasping the concepts.
When calculus becomes less of a computational and more of a problem-solving approach is when you will need the comprehensive understanding. For example, everyone is familiar with PEMDAS - this is the rule for how to solve a problem like
6 + 7 - 5 * 5 (7)^2
You know the rules for how to approach this problem. Similarly, when you see a calculus problem, you will need to know what rules and properties give you the easiest solution path. Unlike straight up arithmetic, there are going to be optimal ways to solve problems and suboptimal ways to solve problems. The suboptimal way may send you into a conceptual dead end (you end up with a function you don't have the skills to derive further, for example) or at the very least will take a lot more time and energy than the optimal solution, which in turn decreases the amount of time you have to complete the other problems on an exam. For example, if given a certain problem, you might try to approach it by using technique #3, then use property 4 and 5, then it becomes too complicated to go on; so, you try to do technique #4, and you see that you only need to use property 3, and the resulting equation becomes super easy to handle on a computational level. That is the goal - to find the optimal path. So, just stay on top of your shit, ask the professor as soon as you don't grasp something, meet with them after class, go to office hours, go to the study center, all of that normie shit. If you have conceptual limitations, that is the best way to overcome them and succeed. GLHF
