Ask HN: I'm 20 and I need advice.
If you were 20 years old today, what would you be doing?

I am 20. My goal is to amass $1m (Australian) by 35 so I can do some substantial things later in life (I've got an idea for a business of maintaining water wells built by various charities in African villages and charging the US government for it.). I could do this by getting a high paying job within 5 years and getting above average returns investing $50,000 a year. I could also do this by building a successful small business and reaping a high income or even gasp selling that business for $1 million.

I imagined that if I was 35, and I became 20 again and asked myself what I would be doing... I'd be saving money, learning how to invest in stocks, a girlfriend, learning to drive, finding a part time IT job, building random stuff and trying my hand at making a mini-business.

I've saved up several thousand dollars which I've invested into various stocks (and got lucky :] ). I have a girlfriend, and I make stuff in my spare time. All I think I need to do now is learn to drive and get a job. Driving lessons cost money so I'll do that when I get an IT job first or some other form of income.

The problem is, I can't find a job.

I've been reading lately about how IT-related university degrees are worthless if you want a job in IT... Either you've been putting effort into learning programming so you've become proficient and easily become hired, or you don't.

I'm still in university studying software engineering / commerce (3rd of 5 years). I've applied for many (every) programmer job that seems remotely doable for me, but besides a telephone interview for a internship and an email or two I haven't gotten anything back.

I am alone.

In my software engineering degree year, there are people of various degrees of competency. There are some who are so good they already have jobs in IT companies before they entered university. There are average people who seem to get 60-70% in their assignments... but wouldn't be able to start a proper project for real. Then there are students who copy and paste code instead of using for loops and still managing to pass.

The smartest people (ones with jobs already) seem to be stuck ups and they talk about students not in their clique as if they're lower life forms, so I haven't bothered making friends with them. My friends in uni are of the second group... good enough to do the degree but not quite people I'd choose to work with on projects with.

I feel like I'm one of a kind... I get full marks for most of my assessments but I know nowhere near as much as the smartest students. They each have slick personal websites and portfolios of past projects and stuff, know the latest version control tools, can solve homework problems in seconds, etc. I have past projects too but not of the type I'd show to people....

I spent most of my free time programming things. My latest 'project' is a site for trading used textbooks, (I needed one and IMO the existing ones sucked). This is my most ambitious to date. I keep looking for people in my university to work with me but students seem to either be not good enough, or they're too good for me : /. I did find a acquaintance yesterday who was doing a design degree offering to do a landing page for me, though. Progress is chugging along but I have no one to guide me. I've razed the project and rebuilt it half a dozen times after finding some fatal architectural flaw and recently I've just found out using tables to layout pages is a bad thing : / . Every time this happens I get some what discouraged however I push on because I still need to make an extra $1000 by the end of the year to spend * (It doesn't look like I'll make it). If this site becomes popular enough I was thinking I could charge for extra services like bolding a textbook listing, or sticky-ing it for a short period of time; Ads is also an option.

I'm not getting anywhere.

I'm learning a lot the past two years but it seems like I'll never quite get good enough to be doing 'real work'. It's like entering the ocean to escape a deserted island; the island becomes smaller and smaller behind you while in front of you is the big blue ocean with nothing but water in sight... I keep learning stuff but there's always more that's "must-know knowledge to become good programmer". The latest one of these this year is "testing".

No, I'm not going back to work in McDonalds. I've worked there for three years and frankly I'm sick of dealing with the stress of waking up in wee hours and coming back home past midnight, not to mention the substantially lower academic grades that'll come with spending so much energy making burgers.

I guess all I'm looking for is some re-assurance that I'm doing the right things; I feel I'm not making much progress anymore even if I logically believe it'll be fine eventually as long as I keep putting effort in... Let me go back to my original topic: If you were 20 years old today, what would you be doing?

* I don't dip into my savings because its my retirement fund - it's for "learning how to invest in stocks" and buying capital goods like houses and computers only.... at least until I'm 35. To spend an extra $1000, I have to earn it, not just sleep waiting for stocks to grow.

And that's my life story so far.