> the serendipitous connections that I made by being mixed in with a bunch of smart people who like to tinker. You're lucky - some colleges have that atmospher

> the serendipitous connections that I made by being mixed in with a bunch of smart people who like to tinker. You're lucky - some colleges have that atmosphere, and many do not. At 18 I certainly wasn't capable of picking that sort of environment on purpose, and no one around me knew how to advise me. So I tried a few different colleges, and didn't find anything that I cared about, and just started working instead. Fortunately there are other places to meet those communities of people. Sometimes you'll go to an event and half of them went to college together - at MIT or Reed or Grinnell or Bard or UC Berkeley or Mudd or some other random place (most of which I had never heard of when I was looking at colleges). But the other half are just random people like me, who jumped into this culture at age 23 or 30 or whatever. And the handfull of years that they knew each-other way back when matter less and less over time.