Choosing a college
nostrademons: > I’m still curious as to what might have sunk me at those places.I'm guessing that you seem too one-dimensional.  Admissions committees look for someone that'll add diversity to the campus - not just racial diversity, but diversity of interests too.I went to Amherst (College, not UMass).  Something like 1 in 8 of my admitted class had a 4.0 and 1 in 10 had perfect SATs, but we all had something else besides that.  Like my astro-major dormmate who was also a nationally-ranked scrabble player.  Or my friend who'd been left for dead at age 10 in Liberia, and had started his own organization dedicated to eradicating child soldiers.  I'd worked in an all-teenage dot-com in my gap year before college, too.Anyway, here's my somewhat heretical advice:Don't go to college - yet.  Instead, if you're really set on tech entrepreneurship, take a year off and found a startup.  Take it as far as you can - pick out a market, talk to people in that market, try to design and build a product that satisfies that market.If you succeed, great - you don't need college.  You can always pull a Woz and go back anyway.  But even if you fail, it'll teach you lots about what you really want to do.  It may not be what you think now.  One of my biggest regrets is that I basically planned my college career based on what I thought I wanted to do in my last year of high school, completely ignoring the lessons from my gap year.  I could've saved myself a lot of aggravation and made my college experience a lot more meaningful had I adjusted my plans for where I wanted to go and what I wanted to study based on my experience working in a tech startup.And if you fail - great.  You'll look so much better to colleges for having given it a shot.  Maybe you'll even get into Stanford or MIT next time around.