Title: Background: I'm 18 years old, American, and attend an Ivy League college. It seems that I've tried to do a very long list of things, but that none of them ever actually succeed. Some of the things I've tried:<p>- Wrote a program to model the stock market. (The capital I needed evaporated during the credit crunch).<p>- Worked on a paper with a professor. (The professor bailed and they had access to lots of equipment I would have needed to finish it myself).<p>- Worked on a second paper with a second professor in another department. (Same story).<p>- Applied to Harvard, MIT and Stanford, the three big startup schools, twice, got rejected by all both times. (The school I'm going to is good academically but produces zero startups).<p>- Tried to start a company over the summer. (The other two people working with me bailed in August and are refusing to acknowledge that I own the rights to the portions of the code I wrote. Don't know what I'll do since I can't afford to sue them.)<p>- Tried to start a second company the previous summer. (Found out that that particular business had much larger capital requirements than I had thought.)<p>- Submitted my own paper to a conference, gave a talk there, but the paper was never published. (The special issue of the journal they were going to publish it in was canceled, and I haven't found another journal that would accept it.)<p>- Submitted second paper to second conference in different field. (Same story.)<p>- Applied for research internships last summer. (Rejected by all).<p>- Applied for finance internships this summer. (Rejected by all so far, not heard back from some yet, would appreciate suggestions if anyone has any).<p>- Helped to write a web application last summer. (No one uses it, and the other people working on it, who have a great deal of needed expertise, have moved onto more interesting projects).<p>- Did another webapp for one of the student clubs. (Someone else also wrote one and theirs was better, so everyone (including me) just used that instead.)<p>- Half a dozen math/science contests which I've entered. I recruited some fellow students to help practice and then we met weekly to work on our strategies. (Did badly in all of them.)<p>- Tried to start a blog, worked on it for two years. (Pretty much nobody read it.)<p>Am I doing anything wrong, just in general?<p>(Formatting fixed, sorry).
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