[cianestro]

I have many friends who are much less intelligent than I who are attending "better" schools for infuriatingly trivial reasons. Getting good grades has as much to do with intelligence as it does with your ability to take tests--unless you come across a really good teacher. Forget about dreams of elitist schools (for now) and find/start a project to build a knowledge base around. Make sure it's something you have the resources for and also is big enough to require you to learn new subjects. This project will serve as your point of reference for "building" new learning habits quite organically around. It will tell you what, how, why, and with whom you will learn with versus vague ideals and arbitrary academia romanticism dictating your future. However, realize the project itself is merely a crutch for your brain to grow stronger on--you will eventually outgrow it and require a new one. Walk into a professor's office, they are very lonely and love attention, and I guarantee you they are working on something you could define as a "project" and would love to point you in the right direction. Most have to in order to keep their jobs. Undergraduate students have a hard time understanding that they need some sort of internal locus and not their friends and teachers in order to be intelligent--but they eventually catch on to this like you have just now. The hardest part will be the sacrifices you'll have to make and endure in every imaginable facet of your life; you'll have to cut a lot of loose ends (bad habits/routines) off from your life. Eventually, though, you'll find your path to enlightenment and it's always one with heart and is rarely found but more so stumbled upon (hint: always within close proximity of powerful computers and by path I mean nerd and by stumbled upon I mean HN). Only then, once found, will you know if you will need to attend a particular school or not. (good music helps to rewire your brain and the subsequent lonely spells; cats are smart because they're curious, not the other way around; also, the smarter you get the more you laugh...muhahahah)

...sooner or later you're going to realize just as I did that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. - Morpheus