“Thing you should do in college” (and something I wish I’d known earlier): ensure that the (default) career environment in your field of study is aligned with your preferred working experience (and find out your actual preferred working experience).
I studied engineering and found the default “go to the office and work with a bunch of engineers” career environment unpleasant (and probably, largely unavoidable). I’m much happier after pivoting into a core interest and programming, etc., remotely.
I suspect the same applies in other professions—and may come as a shock to the graduate (for whom it is, probably, too late)—where, e.g., your love of the outdoors led you to believe you would be collecting soil samples in a bog everyday and instead you spend 95% of your days inside filing paperwork about bog permits.
I will suggest that a potentially very-high-impact “thing you should do” (in / before college)—based on the selection effects of being on this website and reading this post—is seriously consider the possibility that you are some degree of autistic, likely masked by intelligence and achievement, and that not being aware of that possibility may (strongly, negatively) impact your ability to achieve items on the “can do” list in ways that will look confusing and inexplicable from the in- and outside.
In particular, read / listen about what an autism / high-intelligence combination feels like from the inside, and consider the explanatory power it holds for your experiences, e.g., other people read too much into your “tone” and not your carefully-chosen words and react unexpectedly (and apparently unreasonably); explaining the reasoning behind your decisions only makes things worse, you’re “arguing”, “trying to win”, “won’t let it go”, etc.; and various other misalignments between the information you communicate and how / if it is received.
(You may also wish to make the same considerations regarding ADHD, then, too.)
Disclaimer: I do not know that I would have listened if I read this five, or even two, years ago. But it is something that present-me wishes past-me had had. And for n=1, I believe that the risk and distress of continuing without this knowledge far outweighs the risk of changing one’s behavior due to a false positive.
(It is also possible that this comment already exists as implicit knowledge in the LessWrong community and I merely missed it in passing. But in a year-or-so-plus spent lurking, I did not find or absorb it.)
I read “Thinking By The Clock” in my inbox and ended up here (…and with ten other open tabs to read up on). To apply what I learned about fighting the bystander effect and dispensing cookies: thanks for writing—reading your posts has measurably improved my day!
(Turns out my reading diet was deficient in LessWrong-ium—a necessary nutrient—and incessantly checking Hacker News can be a symptom of LessWrong-ium deficiency.)
Regrettably, I happened upon much of what I’ve read haphazardly, and I am not (personally) aware of specific resources in the rationalist tradition.
I will link you to two sites that I can quickly recall—but I would recommend reading them in order to build your own intuitive framework about autism—not with the rigor I would expect of more rationalism-adjacent blogs (i.e., they are aimed at the general internet audience).
“Monotropism,” a trait that may characterize autism
“The Double Empathy Problem”