Some great advice. If you treat college as another means to an end, you might become exactly what you wanted to be when you were 17. Interesting people I know all agree that their 17-year-old self couldn't know what their 25 or 30 year-old self wanted.
Therefore, the best path is to get good grades, learn about what interests you and otherwise, just concentrate on becoming your older self well. Sometimes the order of those three is not as important.
Interesting people I know all agree that their 17-year-old self couldn't know what their 25 or 30 year-old self wanted.
Absolutely true. I just mentioned to my little brother yesterday:
"If 27 year old me had stepped out of a portal to 1999 and said 'Patrick, stop fooling around and study that freaking subjunctive case in Spanish, you'll have to explain how it works to someone in ten years in Japanese', I would have told him to take his crazy shapeshifting Terminator self back through the portal."
Some good advice there. I went through university (in the UK) with only a medium amount of effort (I failed and had to do resit exams for 2 years) and scraped out a 2:1. But because I had spent time playing around in areas that interested me (aka security) finding a job afterwards was not difficult - I had character and a feel for the job, my mediocre degree wasnt really a factor.
A coursemate who spent a LOT of time working (and not socialising) got himself a top grade 1st and is still (a year later) struggling to find work.
The one thing to take away from this post is "Interesting things happen to interesting people." Therefore make yourself interesting. Most of the rest of it is extremely misleading.
As with most career/life advice, its relevance depends on what you want to accomplish. The kind of broad "pursue a lot of different things" approach advocated here is great for some people, but it definitely can limit your opportunities. For instance, if you want to get into top PhD programs the professors reviewing your application will care that you had a triple major and took the hardest courses in your field. If you don't focus early, you'll miss that opportunity.
The argument here is that college is too early a time to focus on one thing. Even though I didn't, I disagree that this is generally good advice. There are many ways to be interesting.
I wouldn't call it amazing, but there is definitely some useful stuff in there. I would distill the entire thing down to "engage with material that you enjoy learning, and success will follow."
Therefore, the best path is to get good grades, learn about what interests you and otherwise, just concentrate on becoming your older self well. Sometimes the order of those three is not as important.