Ask HN: What should I learn/do in high school? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What should I learn/do in high school?

1 pointwitecasl4 comments

I've followed the typical path of do well in school and take hard classes but also interning at a local startup, but lately they've been leaving me feeling uninspired and lacking self-agency (I've been following standards set by my parents/teachers). I'm relatively strong in cs/engineering (leading a school robotics team). It might just be teen rebellion, but I'd like to leverage it to do something with my life.

Looking for any advice. Thanks.

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I'm assuming you are talking about cs stuff, but work on stuff that you enjoy doing. As obvious as that sounds, I wish I had spent more time learning cs before I came to college. In fact, it is my biggest regret in terms of education. Of course I enjoy computer science immensely and I don't let this regret hinder me now that I am in college, but if there's any advice I think you should take at this moment, just work on stuff you enjoy.

If you play video games, write a mod/cheat for them, or even server host if the game you play allows for it. I am NOT saying to use the cheat to win, but the knowledge you gain from writing one is invaluable if you find it interesting, and the same applies for modding/server hosting. Having played a ton of video games in high school, especially counter strike, I knew a ton of people that hosted servers and wrote cheats, and I personally think it's the best pipeline to being cracked at cs, specifically my friends that developed cheats. If you have an interest in ML, train a model to make market predictions. None of these projects need to be fully flushed out, but its a good conversation piece and employers like seeing self-driven development. You only get less free time the older you get, so get started early! Also enjoy high school, don't let your work consume you.

Both you and the world are changing so fast now that nobody can foresee where these changes will take us. And therefore nobody really knows what is good advice or what is bad advice.

Put a whole lot of effort into exploring and mastering various ways to learn. Get very good at it in many different contexts. You'll be doing a lot of it in your live. You will have to re-invent yourself multiple times. If you don't master changing yourself to keep up with things, you will slowly descend into a life of joyless drudgery.

Sounds like you’ve got the technical chops down. No better time than the present to work on the hard part which is soft skills. People skills, networking, effective communication and so forth.

Also a good time to establish physical health habits. Better shape/good cardio/good diet = more energy.

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