Good call on the club thing. I'm a marketing/management student and I ended up as president of the human resources club on campus. It is a good thing I did, because now I get to go to all the alumni events and meet important people I wouldn't have otherwise.

To the OP - Just get involved. Start by going to every event and club meeting on campus and stay at it until something sticks.

Contextual popup bubbles are the best. If I can't figure out what a button does, I usually hover for a second for an explanation.

Yes, I find these most helpful too.

The exit is the hardest part - by far.

I agree with this. My biggest fear up to last year was public speaking. No matter what format it was, I just hated being in front of people. Then one day, I decided I wasn't going to suck at it anymore and I started to seek out opportunities to present, and I slowly got better. It is still pretty terrifying, but usually I'm the only one who notices.

The bands. I was in one for a long time, and until we finally settled on a name, we would make a brand new page three or four times a week.

What part of New Jersey are you from?

across the bridge from philly

Speaking of a lathe, I know a few kids who recently started a custom drum company.

Good advice! As far as the profs go, I was hoping they might know of a club on campus that was doing something other than C and Java, but it was a bust anyway. :-(

And I have seen other people try my idea in limited form, but they all sucked. Really what this is, is a way for me to help MYSELF out. But I am definitely going to stay at it and make it work one way or another.

You need to do what I did, which is what you're doing right now: Find the people online who are doing PHP and Rails, and hang out with them there. Use IRC. Join an open source project. Since you were crazy enough to mention PHP in your list of higher aspirations, let me point out that the Drupal project could really use good coders, to say nothing of good documenters. ;)

You'll always find better hackers by traveling to them online then by traveling to them in real life. The work is all on the screen. I learned web development because I started reading Greenspun's website and just kept going. Now you've got PG's essays and this site, which would have been like heaven if they'd been around when I was an undergrad. Now that the podcast, the screencast, Youtube, git, Sourceforge, and Trac have been invented you can have a flourishing career without ever meeting a teacher, a collaborator, or a customer in person. They could all be in completely different countries.

Of course, you might still want to meet your collaborators in person if you want to do a startup. You could switch universities. :) You could plan to get your first job in a startup hub where you can seek out news.yc readers. You could take some trains to NYC and attend the Rails user group there. They were still a happening thing, last I heard. Zed Shaw might turn up, and that guy is a trip.

Meanwhile, I have a physics degree, so before I say any more my guild requires me to issue this advice: "To heck with C and Java, and with PHP and Ruby for that matter; you're in college, so spend your spare time taking all those physics courses (or econ, or linguistics, or molecular biology, or art...) that you can't get anywhere else! The web isn't going anywhere, and it's better at teaching you web technologies than any school."

UPDATE: I left out statistics. You want to learn a really valuable, somewhat tedious black art that most people don't understand, to their peril? Take an intro statistics course.