Whether you already have your major, grad school, and post-grad job path all planned out or you have no idea what you’re going to do with your life, there’s nothing that says you have to follow the usual college script to get to where you’re going (whether you know yet where that is or not).
Instead of trudging through four years of classes, intramurals, roommates, and "self-discovery" along with everyone else, break away from the pack, make a name for yourself, and do something you never thought you could do this young. Here are 10 things that are totally feasible that will change your life, redefine your college experience, and might even score you a place in a few history books.
1) Start a political party.
Sound far-fetched? Actually, it requires about as much work as one of your poli sci papers — in fact, you might consider suggesting it to your poli sci prof as an alternative project to your term paper.
The rules for registering a new political party vary by state, but in general, to get started, you’ll just need to decide on a name for your party, draft a constitution of your party’s bylaws, and elect some temporary officials at your first party “convention.” And even though the Republican and Democratic conventions are extravagant, stadium-filling affairs, all a meeting has to do to qualify as a “convention” is bring you and the other founders of your party together.
So go out for pizza with a few of your buddies, and over a couple of slices, declare yourself the chairperson, name one of your friends the vice-chair, another two the treasurer and secretary, and you just had your first party convention.
Getting a candidate on the ballot is a little more complicated and normally involves collecting a bunch of signatures. But even if you never launch the next Ralph Nader or Ross Perot, how impressive — for all you practical, career-driven types — would Chairperson and Founder of the So-and-So Party look on your college résumé?
2) Spearhead humanitarian work in a third-world country.
Choose work that’s in line with your major, and you could knock out a whole bunch of birds with one volunteer project: Besides bulking up your résumé with international public service and getting to help people as you immerse yourself in another part of the world, you may be able to get course credit while you’re doing it. Meet with your advisor, and see if you can structure an independent study program out of your efforts that will give you credit towards your major.
Are you studying environmental engineering? Devise a water purification system for a remote village plagued by contaminated water. Marine biology? Choose an island-nation where you can do eco-diversity work and start a coastal conservation effort. Computer and network systems? Travel to Africa, South America, or rural Asia, and help impoverished schools set up basic computer labs and Internet access to be their portal to the outside world.
If you're not sure what kind of work you want to do, look into the kinds of programs being run by public service organizations, and browse the sites of groups like the Peace Corps and Voluntary Service Overseas for ideas.
3) Start a company.
In the spring of 1999, a 19-year-old freshman at Boston’s Northeastern University, Shawn Fanning, wrote a program that would go on to become a little thing called Napster. Five years later, Mark Zuckerberg, another 19-year-old college student, launched Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard. Now only 24, Zuckerberg is Facebook’s CEO and has already received (and turned down) a $900 million buyout offer from Yahoo.
College Prowler was founded as a graduate business school project by Luke Skurman for his entrepreneurship class at Carnegie Mellon University, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin were getting ready to launch Google while they were still Ph.D. students in the computer science program at Stanford.
The lesson is you don’t have to be an MBA in your 40s to be a successful exec heading up your own company. In fact, in March, Forbes named Zuckerberg one of the world’s 10 youngest billionaires and “quite possibly the world’s youngest self-made billionaire ever.” If you have a great idea, unleash it online, turn it into a business, and you could be the next college-aged mogul behind your own multimillion-dollar empire.
4) Start an underground newspaper.
Not the corporate type? Instead of a company, start an underground newspaper, and put your independent thinking and creativity to work. Get the right team of writers and photographers together to collaborate on your paper, and not only could you end up with the next VillageVoice or Los Angeles Free Press, but you’ll get to add Founder and Managing Editor-in-Chief to a suddenly very impressive college résumé.
5) Write a book.
You’re probably already getting plenty of practice writing — term papers, theses, research findings, lab reports. Here’s your chance to write about something you actually care about that you’re not being graded on.
If you’re a creative writer, you can try your hand at short stories or a novel, poetry or a memoir. But a nonfiction book can be just as creative — pick something you’re passionate about that you enjoy reading up on and discussing, and dive in: Write a book of movie or music reviews, a restaurant guide, dating tips, the best places to go on a road trip, your take on the best comic books and graphic novels of the last 50 years ... .
Write a page a day, and by the time summer vacation rolls around, you’ll have over 350 pages. Post excerpts to your blog, and you could end up with a loyal audience that can’t wait to read the next thing you write. Garner enough traffic, and you may even draw the attention of an agent or publisher.
6) Record a full-length album.
Thanks to Apple’s Macbooks, GarageBand, and affordable recording equipment, you don’'t need a full-blown studio with a million-dollar setup to make an album anymore. Record your music at home, mix and engineer it on your laptop, and then go digital.
Upload your finished songs to your MySpace page. Put your music up for sale on CD Baby or Amie Street. Post a clip of a live and acoustic performance to YouTube. Whether your album sinks into Internet obscurity or becomes a college radio hit, imagine being able to go back 15, 20, or 30 years down the road, and listen to the type of music you recorded when you were only 18.
7) Enter a film festival.
Like making music, making movies has also become a lot easier — and a lot more inexpensive. With a digital camera and some basic video editing software, you could become the next acclaimed documentary filmmaker, indie darling, or Kevin Smith.
And you don’t need to have tens of thousands of dollars or break big at Sundance, Cannes, or Tribeca. Look for local or student film festivals, or enter an online filmmaking competition and walk away with a scholarship or generous cash prize.
8) Break a world record.
You don’t need to be an athletic machine or a genetic freak to go down in the world record history books. You may not have the longest toenails on the planet, but can you amass the world’s Largest Collection of Traffic Cones? Or beat two minutes and 19.91 seconds to set a new Fastest Time to Eat a 12-Inch Pizza? If you can shove down just six of those gold-wrapped, Ferrero Rocher bites of chocolate hazelnut deliciousness in less than a minute, you can set a new world record for Most Ferrero Rocher Chocolates Eaten in One Minute.
If you’re not so good at the fast thing, take a leisurely walk instead. Make it for 81 miles while balancing a milk bottle on your head, and you can unseat Ashrita Furman of New York as the world-record holder in the Greatest Distance Walked With a Milk Bottle Balanced on the Head.
Or, if you’re more of a team player, get some of your classmates together and go for one of the group world records. Find 637 other people willing to dress up as apes, and you’ll set a new record for the Largest Gathering of People Dressed as Gorillas. Or get the entire stadium of fans involved at the next football game and try to form the Largest Human Logo to take the title away from Portugal.
Just maybe hope your professor doesn’t share your history-making ambition. The world record you probably don’t want to be a part of is a five-day, nonstop lecture. A professor in India set a world record for the Longest Lecture Marathon, lecturing for 120 hours on personality development.
Browse the Guinness Book of World Records, and see what weird yet for-some-reason-measured things are within your reach. If you don’t like any of their ideas, come up your own category, then do something spectacular in it, and submit it for Guinness’ consideration — whacked-out and completely pointless goes to the front of the line.
9) Tour all 50 states by car.
Taking the ultimate road trip through all 50 states (with a necessary sail or flight to get to Hawaii) is an experience that would not only leave you with a library’s worth of stories and pictures but give you an accomplishment that few people, including those who live their whole lives in the United States, even attempt.
To have a truly unique experience, plan your trip using a site like Roadside America that can serve as a guide to the quirky, out-of-the-way things you should see wherever you go, those pieces of rarely touched Americana that aren’t Statues of Liberty or Mount Rushmores or the other obvious destinations that top everyone else’s list.
Take your laptop with you and keep a blog diary from the road; you can start your very own travel blog on a site like TravelPod or Travel Blog. Or grab a guitar or a videocam for the road, and you could scratch something else off this list while you’re seeing the states: Film your journey and your meetings with people for a roadside documentary, or draw on your experiences to write songs or stories about those places in America that not everyone gets to see.
For inspiration, check out the YERT (Your Environmental Road Trip) project, chronicling the year-long “eco-expedition” of a team of travelers that explored all 50 states by car.
10) Hike the Appalachian Trail.
If you’d rather make your mark by foot than by car, join the short list of the 9,000-plus people who have reported hiking the full length of the Appalachian Trail, which spans most of the East Coast. Designated in 1968 as the first national scenic trail, the Appalachian Trail is the longest marked footpath in the United States, roughly 2,175 miles long and taking approximately 5 million footsteps to walk its entire length.
You can start at Springer Mountain in Georgia and work your way north to Mount Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine. Along the way, you’ll cross 14 states, eight national forests, and six national parks, and see parts of nature that you may never see anywhere else: The trail is home to more than 2,000 plants and animals that have been designated as rare, threatened, endangered, or sensitive species.