Some obvious advice (YMMV) - roughly in order of importance:
Improve your long-term physical and mental health- that’s often harder later in life and probably the most important thing.
Improve your English: English is really important- learning languages is often harder when older.
Ideally, you’d do language immersion in an English-speaking country to increase your functional fluency
Reduce your accent because that’s really hard later in life.
Vocab and grammar: Start a Remnote and add vocab that you come across and don’t know (maybe also have a look at English anki decks).
Do a (research) internship. Universities train everyone to become a researcher, and there are reasons for that, one is that the scientific method is really important to internalize and then also that if you have the knacks to become a researcher that would be really valuable and also research skills are pretty broadly useful, so it might be good to explore this early, but of course you don’t need to become a researcher.
Improve your writing: it’s a very generalizable and very important skill—you need in almost any profession. ‘Writing is thinking’. Take “Writing in the sciences” MOOC. Start a journal and a blog.
Get a headstart: Read “How to win at College” (also “Deep Work” and “Digital Minimalism” by that author). There are some studies showing that having more education or being older before going to university increases educational attainment later.
So one thing might be to move to Dublin (you don’t need a visa) for a research internship (you could just email Professors and ask for an internship or ask the EA Dublin people there for help). Then do some self-study, go to the gym, socialize on the side.
Some other ideas:
Learn to code: this will be very important for almost any research or engineering career, take an intro computer science course or do a bootcamp.
Money: The best investment advice is to invest in yourself, so you set earn more money later (e.g. learning, getting good grades, applying for scholarships—which has very high ROI (often >$100/h, but is also good for your CV). If you need to get a job, find one where you learn as much as possible… e.g. tutoring in your subject might not pay as much in terms of $/h, but you solidify/deepen the knowledge of your subject at the same time, and that’ll pay off later.
If you’re atheist consider exploring some sort of spiritual practise like meditation (e.g. with the Waking Up app).
If you haven’t yet, learn an instrument—also harder later in life.
Explore different subjects / become well-rounded: In Europe, you can’t take courses from outside of your field of study like. So maybe read some other books—Kagan “Normative Ethics”, Polya’s “How to solve it”, Sowell’s “Basic Economics”. Schwanitz ‘Bildung’, More textbooks).
Start a project (e.g. social media channel, start a shopify and sell anything).
But note that you could also just go on an adventure like interrailing or something… in the explore/exploit tradeoff when you’re young it’s good to try a bunch of things.
Thanks for all the Advice. I think I’m already doing surprisingly many things that you listed (speaking English, meditation, instrument...) but I’ll definitely start coding and read some of the books you listed. I’ll consider doing a Research internship. Thanks
Some obvious advice (YMMV) - roughly in order of importance:
Improve your long-term physical and mental health- that’s often harder later in life and probably the most important thing.
Improve your English: English is really important- learning languages is often harder when older.
Ideally, you’d do language immersion in an English-speaking country to increase your functional fluency
Reduce your accent because that’s really hard later in life.
Vocab and grammar: Start a Remnote and add vocab that you come across and don’t know (maybe also have a look at English anki decks).
Do a (research) internship. Universities train everyone to become a researcher, and there are reasons for that, one is that the scientific method is really important to internalize and then also that if you have the knacks to become a researcher that would be really valuable and also research skills are pretty broadly useful, so it might be good to explore this early, but of course you don’t need to become a researcher.
Improve your writing: it’s a very generalizable and very important skill—you need in almost any profession. ‘Writing is thinking’. Take “Writing in the sciences” MOOC. Start a journal and a blog.
Get a headstart: Read “How to win at College” (also “Deep Work” and “Digital Minimalism” by that author). There are some studies showing that having more education or being older before going to university increases educational attainment later.
So one thing might be to move to Dublin (you don’t need a visa) for a research internship (you could just email Professors and ask for an internship or ask the EA Dublin people there for help). Then do some self-study, go to the gym, socialize on the side.
Some other ideas:
Learn to code: this will be very important for almost any research or engineering career, take an intro computer science course or do a bootcamp.
Money: The best investment advice is to invest in yourself, so you set earn more money later (e.g. learning, getting good grades, applying for scholarships—which has very high ROI (often >$100/h, but is also good for your CV). If you need to get a job, find one where you learn as much as possible… e.g. tutoring in your subject might not pay as much in terms of $/h, but you solidify/deepen the knowledge of your subject at the same time, and that’ll pay off later.
If you’re atheist consider exploring some sort of spiritual practise like meditation (e.g. with the Waking Up app).
If you haven’t yet, learn an instrument—also harder later in life.
Explore different subjects / become well-rounded: In Europe, you can’t take courses from outside of your field of study like. So maybe read some other books—Kagan “Normative Ethics”, Polya’s “How to solve it”, Sowell’s “Basic Economics”. Schwanitz ‘Bildung’, More textbooks).
Start a project (e.g. social media channel, start a shopify and sell anything).
But note that you could also just go on an adventure like interrailing or something… in the explore/exploit tradeoff when you’re young it’s good to try a bunch of things.
Thanks for all the Advice. I think I’m already doing surprisingly many things that you listed (speaking English, meditation, instrument...) but I’ll definitely start coding and read some of the books you listed. I’ll consider doing a Research internship. Thanks