Ask HN: I've tried lots of things but haven't finished any.

I'll take your webapp you built for a student club as an example. What made the other person's better? What did you learn, if anything, from building that webapp? If you had another opportunity like that, what would you do differently?

You seem like a smart and motivated kid; I'm sure you can figure out what went wrong in each instance (excepting maybe the Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and internship positions). I'm sure you can even find problems with the internships. First, you're too young. I'm guessing you're a Freshman or a Sophomore, depending on whether or not you graduated early from high school. Most companies don't look at you until you're a junior or senior. Plus, it's a recession, so companies are more likely to cut internship budgets. That being said, you may have set your sights too high on gaining an internship. If you applied to say, Google, or another company renowned for its extremely high standards, you shouldn't be disappointed if you didn't get accepted. If you want to do web development, look for a local web development shop that might be willing to hire you. You might get lucky and not even have to work as an "intern"; you may very well get hired outright. I've already managed to do that twice, and where I am is hardly considered a tech center, but there's a decent amount of CS students at my Univ. that would kill for my job.

Back to the relying on people bit. If you want to build a webapp, build a webapp. It really isn't that difficult to do on your own. Hosting is cheap, and even if you don't ever make it into a real business, you'll likely learn a lot along the way. If you want to start a business, start a business. If other people believe in you and want to join, have it in writing who owns what if things head south. If you didn't have that in your last foray into business, take it as a lesson and move on.

If you really just want to cut your teeth on real world project, find an open source project you believe in and support it. If you think there's a niche that needs to be filled, fill it. The GData Ruby library, for instance, is drastically lacking (the Google Calendar is supported, kind of, but that was it, last I checked). Writing a gem for that has been on my todo list for a while. I'm sure you can think of a few things like that, and it might actually help you land an internship at Google or wherever if you write an open source plugin for one of their products. You can even write that GData library if you really want. I'll let you have it. :)

Edit: My email address is in my profile. If you want someone to work on a few things, let me know.

Then when you've done that try again, but this time with something a bit more ambitious. Find your 'comfort level' and slowly keep expanding that.

If you keep at it this hard surely one day you'll succeed.

best of luck!

This is all true, as far as it goes, but I needn't say it again. Let's try some coaching instead. Vince Lombardi mode, engage!

Stop trying to look smart. Being smart is wonderful as a source of personal pleasure, and is also really useful, but looking smart is an empty experience. Too easily faked. Any idiot can look smart. Many idiots specialize in it. Bernie Madoff looked smart.

A sure sign that you're trying too hard to look smart is that you are "applying for finance internships" and "modeling the stock market". These are understandable mistakes -- the media works hard to convince you that these are respectable goals, much as they work hard to convince you that blackjack and poker are sexy games that you should play all the time -- but to a scientist this stuff is the badge of the lightweight. It has the intellectual content of a whiffle ball, and the only reason to do it is to collect money, generally from the gullible or the corrupt. (See "Bernie Madoff", above.) Real businesspeople don't "apply for finance internships"; they sell things or make things. And real investors (as opposed to gamblers and shills) don't waste time modeling the market, because they've all read Malkiel.

You are in college. Do you... study anything? Your resume is seriously scary. Where do you find all this time? Your academic work must be way too easy. You are in college right now. You are surrounded by the infrastructure for learning stuff. There will never be a better time for that. Do not waste this time collecting C.V. entries like so many stamps; that is for later. I call upon the spirit of the geek's Vince Lombardi: Yoda.

All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on Where. He. Was. Hmm? What. He. Was doing.

You claim to be interested in physics; do you understand Maxwell's equations, stat mech, quantum decoherence, general relativity? You claim an interest in math; have you run out of math courses? Chemistry: Do you understand the band structure of solids? Biology: Do you know what siRNA is, can you do graduate-level molecular biology lab work? Computers: Have you finished SICP, learned operating systems and algorithms? Have you even considered linguistics, or geology, or anthropology? Study any foreign languages? How's your music theory?

Dabble, but dabble smart. Dabble like a scholar: Study things. Study the hardest things you can find. Study like you mean it.