"I want to join a team or even better, go to college and meet like minded folks"

That sounds like me 3 years ago. When I graduated High School I was looking forward to going to college so that I could meet people who, like me, were interested in building really good software and learning new things... for the sake of learning.

My first year in college I met many people who helped me connect. I am a core team member on the Cappuccino web framework, and that experience is what helped me connect. I thought everyone wanted to learn for the sake of learning, and wanted to build great things. It was enough to suffer through classes which I had little to no interest in, but were required for my "well rounded" education. As my year ended I failed calculus, but that didn't bother me much because I opened doors. I had a few internship offers because of the product I shipped and the work I did on Cappuccino. I turned them down so that I could continue my studies over the summer to catch up (from failing calculus the first time). A mistake I still regret.

I was fortunate that my first computer science professor was like me, interested in learning for the sake of learning, and he built some astonishing cool things. My second semester CS professor (at this time I only took one CS class a semester while I was fulfilling my general education requirements) was terrible. The class was called "Software Engineering" where he would lecture on perl, HTML, and CVS, on occasion he mentioned SVN. My freshman year I spent my nights (many times staying up until 3am in the morning) working on something Cappuccino related. In one night I could learned more than 6 weeks in that second CS class.

I was less enthusiastic my second year (last year), everyone I had met who had interesting and shared the same goals had graduated and moved off. We had discusses starting a business, but each of our situations put those plans on hold... Because I was ahead (because I skipped one CS class) I didn't have a single CS class my second year, since my general education classes were not yet fulfilled. That year was hell, but I worked on many side projects, became much more active in the Cappuccino community, etc. I ended up interning at Inkling in San Francisco last summer, and it was a great experience!

I'm finishing up my 3rd year now, and it's still painful. I spent my of my first semester building BugHub (http://bughubapp.com), and I expect that is what I'll be doing the rest of this semester too. The truth is, I still don't learn much from my CS classes, honestly I should be teaching some of them (I'm certainly more qualified to teach "Web Programming" than a man who worked on compilers at IBM 20 years ago.

What I learned from my nearly 3 years here is that most people don't share the same values I do. Most people are more interested in getting that piece of paper and getting a job that pays the bills with a little left over. University is preparing them to be QA testers. No one is prepared to take on real software engineering challenges. They can't even really explain what an object or class is, or what the difference is. I haven't found anyone else interesting in starting their own company. No one can show me something they're proud of, that they did on their own. It's been disappointing to say the least.

So why haven't I dropped out? College has given me the opportunity to spend time working on my own things. The time I have spent in college led to me learning a lot, but not because of school. It's because I still stay up until 3-4am in the morning working on my own things, trying to understand new stuff, and asking questions to some of the smartest people I know (online). Every opportunity I will have is because of what I've done on my own, not the piece of paper I'll get next year. I can't say that when I graduated high school I was ready to be thrown into the industry... College gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of time learning on my own and as a result I'm much more prepared. The department here doesn't have a lot of offer me, but I'm fortunate to have grown up in the age of the internet where there are so many resources to learn if you really want it.

I can't say this will be your experience, but I was naive going into college... and your premis reminded me a lot of me.