I've tried lots of things but haven't finished any.
ahlatimer: I'll reiterate a lot of what the other people are saying: you're depending too much on other people. You're also looking at certain things that "failed" and saying, "I failed" instead of looking at them and saying "They didn't take off, but I learned this, this, and this."I'll take your webapp you built for a student club as an example. What made the other person's better? What did you learn, if anything, from building that webapp? If you had another opportunity like that, what would you do differently?You seem like a smart and motivated kid; I'm sure you can figure out what went wrong in each instance (excepting maybe the Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and internship positions). I'm sure you can even find problems with the internships. First, you're too young. I'm guessing you're a Freshman or a Sophomore, depending on whether or not you graduated early from high school. Most companies don't look at you until you're a junior or senior. Plus, it's a recession, so companies are more likely to cut internship budgets. That being said, you may have set your sights too high on gaining an internship. If you applied to say, Google, or another company renowned for its extremely high standards, you shouldn't be disappointed if you didn't get accepted. If you want to do web development, look for a local web development shop that might be willing to hire you. You might get lucky and not even have to work as an "intern"; you may very well get hired outright. I've already managed to do that twice, and where I am is hardly considered a tech center, but there's a decent amount of CS students at my Univ. that would kill for my job.Back to the relying on people bit. If you want to build a webapp, build a webapp. It really isn't that difficult to do on your own. Hosting is cheap, and even if you don't ever make it into a real business, you'll likely learn a lot along the way. If you want to start a business, start a business. If other people believe in you and want to join, have it in writing who owns what if things head south. If you didn't have that in your last foray into business, take it as a lesson and move on.If you really just want to cut your teeth on real world project, find an open source project you believe in and support it. If you think there's a niche that needs to be filled, fill it. The GData Ruby library, for instance, is drastically lacking (the Google Calendar is supported, kind of, but that was it, last I checked). Writing a gem for that has been on my todo list for a while. I'm sure you can think of a few things like that, and it might actually help you land an internship at Google or wherever if you write an open source plugin for one of their products. You can even write that GData library if you really want. I'll let you have it. :)Edit: My email address is in my profile. If you want someone to work on a few things, let me know.