I'm not sure this directly applies to you, but the one thing I wish people had told me when I was applying to college was that if you want to be a Master of the Universe, there's still a significant advantage to going to an east coast Ivy League school. My friends at Harvard and Yale and so on have a valuable network of powerful people looking out for them, making sure they get cushy jobs and lecture gigs and book deals. Stanford, by contrast, was all about pushing you into Silicon Valley, either as a startup grunt or a VC pawn.