Speech level with young people

Hello everyone. I have been studying Japanese for a while now and am familiar with the range of pronouns there are to address oneself. However, I am not completely sure which pronouns should be used in the following situation. If I were to meet Japanese students at a university for the first time that were my age or around it, what is the most suitable thing to address myself as (I am an 19 year old male) and to the person I am talking to (both genders)? Also, would I first begin with teineigo as well? Or is it ok to just jump right into plain forms? I know all the grammatical points, I just need to know what level of speech is most appropriate initially and possibly when it is ok to switch into informal talk. I don't want to make a mistake in sounding too rude or too polite, so I want to get this resolved before I potentially embarrass myself. I would like to know the answers to this as soon as possible. Thank you very much.

I lived in japan one year and when talking to peers you talk not in the super polite form

You can't go wrong if you stay with the polite "...desu/masu" form :)

But if you are a student talking with other students of the same age, I'd say, unless you are introducing yourself in front of a group of students for the first time (in which case I would recommend the "....desu/masu" polite form), you can start off with informal speech already, or a mixture of informal and polite speech forms. You know that some sentence endings in informal speech can sound somewhat rough, so not risking sounding rough, I would use polite speech (for example, instead of "....darou" using "deshou," etc.)

If you are joining some kind of sports (extracurricular) clubs where "senpai" and "kouhai" matters, though, then you would want to be careful
that you would use polite form definitely for your "senpai" (seniors).

For first person pronoun, I always recommend "watashi," but there seem to be differing opinions about this lol - some seem to think it doesn't sound like a guy, sounds too feminine. Oh well, you could use "boku." For addressing others, if you don't know their names and have to use some pronoun, stay with the polite "anata." But you will find that as soon as they know others' names, people use "(name) san" or nicknames instead of saying "anata" "kimi."

I think most Japanese students would jump right into plain forms from the first meeting if they talk to ones at the same age/grade or younger except when they introduce themselves to the class or clubs.

As for pronouns, you should be aware that in Japanese conversation, the first and second personal pronouns as subjective (watashi, boku, anata, kimi) are often omitted, especially that is the case when introducing yourself (it's normal that you begin with something like "(your name) desu. .... kara kimashita.") Thus you'd be able to have a talk with others without being so much sensitive about which pronoun you should use.