Start off by looking into where your future college will matriculate credit from. If you're going to school, you absolutely don't want to waste any more time/money than necessary in your general requirements. Most 100/200 level classes in university don't offer you much intellectual bang for your buck. If you could do one semester of community college and one summer term for $5,000 total and knock out 3-4 semesters of high priced boredom inducing garbage general requirement classes, you've got to look into it.<p>Travel's good and builds the hell out of your wisdom and character. You'll get lots of great business ideas from traveling too. There's two schools of thought: Spend less time (4 days to a week) in a bunch of countries to see which you like and see the major attractions, or spend more time in one or two places going for immersion to really deeply learn about the place. I've done both - I "quick travel" through parts of the world that I'm not sure if I'll like (rapidly did most of Europe), and went for more immersion in China and Spain. Japan I passed through on the way to China and fell in love with it, and have been back a number of times.<p>If you travel, I'd say think about picking up some skills instead of just doing tourist stuff. Tourist stuff gets boring. Learning another language, a martial art, or some kind of craft that's big locally could be great times.<p>Working is good, and I know internships aren't such a popular idea on HN, but I interned at my local statehouse for a while between semesters at university and it was blast. Seeing how government really runs to some extent was pretty eye-opening. (It's even more corrupt than you'd expect, but everyone's really nice and friendly)<p>What I'd recommend against: Staying in your home area without a really filled schedule. Because all of your free time is likely to be sunk into whatever you currently do to waste time (so... maybe XBox and Hacker News? Just guessin'). No matter how much you tell yourself you'll read a ton of books, plant trees, go jogging 10 miles a day - you probably won't if you stay on your home turf. You're likely to read more books, jog more, and plant more trees in foreign countries, at least in my experience. If you do decide to stick around wherever you're at, I'd say almost overschedule yourself - some of the most fun I ever had (in retrospect) was when I was running a company full time out of Boston, building a startup in NYC, taking full time courses in project management, and sometimes traveling for work on the weekends to other cities in North America. Maybe 100 hours of my life were booked from the start of the week, but I still had plenty of free time.<p>For whatever reason, being busy always seemed to mean I had more free time: Anyone I wanted to see would always work hard to schedule me into the limited time I had available because I was so scarce, I was never bored, and I realized how precious my own time was so I did plenty of gym-going and reading too. Great times.