What do you wish you had known as a teenager?

That if you're going to go the whole "GPA and prestigious schools don't matter" route at least have a distinguished path in something you're interested in.

In the Software Engineering world, there's nothing more soul sucking than working for nameless DoD contractors and being responsible for debugging terrible code with no documentation. All because you singled your career path into being a language fanboy.

Yes, I know I need to reevaluate my interests.

I miss the simplicity I took for granted as a teenager. In high school, teachers can't bully you. Michael Moore pretty much wrote a movie which put an end to that (joking. sorta). In the real world, man can bosses and coworkers get nasty. If you work somewhere larger or even organized enough, you can contact HR or your bosses superior. But that'll often scare him shitless and result in passive aggressive behavior that's too complex to document.

I'm obviously projecting on the shitty experiences I've had. Just know that if you get stuck with some no name company/contractor, whatever you're doing (probably implementing business logic in a 2005 bug hole for $70k) might be miles away from the exciting stuff on the front page of HN.

I wish I'd paid more attention in the non-academic classes. Cooking, sewing, budgeting and everything else I learned in my home economics class are extremely valuable real world skills and I wish I'd taken more of them after the became optional. Calculus, physics, chemistry, etc have all been basically useless for me personally.

That a uni's exclusivity isn't as important as its location. When you're in high school and going through the college search gauntlet, don't just look at your GPA/test scores and match them with a school that demands similar numbers.

I would have been way better off socially and career-wise at a mid tier school in a nice city like Boston/Philadelphia than at my snooty college in the middle of nowhere.

Why do you care what people think of you? Why are you letting the low-grade morons talk you out of what you are interested in? Develop your mind! Forget the past - hardships will make you into a man to be reckoned with. Play the violin. Cheryl is the one.

The friendships you can make now might be deeper than friendships you make later in life

The people who tend to take charge take charge not because they know more than you or they have better skills or they have charisma, they just like to be in charge. Most of them are idiots.