Ask HN: What to do after graduation with 100k?
Background:
I'm 21 and currently approaching the final year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia. I'm a business major at the McIntire school which is fairly respected (http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/index.html) and concentrating in management with a sort of sub-track in a newly launched entrepreneurship program that I'm excited about (co-taught by some entrepreneur alumni). The business program is a two year program and I came out of high school with enough college credits that I've been able to take more or less any classes I've been interested in (mostly Philosophy, Political theory, Psychology.. I seem to like the P's). I absolutely love the college academic environment as I love learning. As a result I've done excellent in school all while managing to have sometimes too much fun in the process.
I got involved with my first web based start-up when I was 13/14. I saw a business model (niche market, digital product related), thought I could do a better job, and more or less copied it. Within a year I ended merging and working with the business I copied. My age never really came up until I was there for a while and at that point I was 17 or so and the owner ended up getting out of the business and I split off with some others and we formed our own company doing the same thing (although a bit better). We ended up growing the firm to $250,000 in revenues with a great profit margin, however at that point we became distracted and complacent (I was enjoying college, the head "techie" partner was rapidly advancing in his day job as a programmer, people got married and had first kids etc.) and more or less let the business die down.
I've played with a few other startup ideas since then related to the same niche I had experience in (one was doing fine, but I didn't have the passion for it and couldn't deliver a product/service that I thought was good enough so shut it down; another I started last summer and the business model works and it is generating maybe a steady $10-20 a day, but that is only with about 100 unique users a day..it's very scalable and is designed to be a semi-passive cash cow but am having trouble bringing in the traffic; if I could get 1,000 targeted uniques a day probably about $100/day and so on). I just recently bought out a partner of the original start-up and am trying to bring it back to where it was before. However, the competition is a lot stronger now, and I'm a bit burned out of the business and would probably prefer to work on other things.
In this process I've managed to save about 100k in cash/liquid assets that aren't in a Roth IRA or anything like..and I have my expenses for next year (class/rent/food) covered. The question deals with what to do with those assets...
The Question Arises:
This summer I'm interning at a global high tech physical manufacturing firm. Great brand name, the compensation is great, and I'm more or less doing a lot of financial analysis and writing whitepapers related to internal business processes and international banking. All the main projects I work on are fairly interesting (Even if most of my downtime I'm doing silly intern things like the occasional printing, photocopying, filing, or any work someone else doesn't want to do etc.) and I work with good people...but really don't seem to like working for a large corporation. All the roles are so specialized and bureaucratic, it's very 8-5 cubicle work, and there just seems to be a constant "cog in the machine" alienation from the work that is being done and the finished product. I've realized I really don't like that. That's partly because the finished product is unbelievably complex and there isn't really another way to setup the system, but I feel my early start-up experience has spoiled me and for the most part I dislike the job and could in no way see myself doing it for the rest of my life or even a year.
The Question:
So, I have one more year of school left to sort of prepare for my exit into the real world. Unlike most on HN I'm not much of a programmer (I tried to teach myself some C++ back when I was younger, but never really enjoyed it that much; I've recently been teaching myself the basics of Ruby because I got tired of hiring people to fix things, but not sure if I have a passion for it although enjoy learning it as of now...will see when I learn a bit more) although I am very technical and been working with/building and playing with old computers since I was probably about seven or eight years old.
I really want to move to a major city, and have wanted to move to the Silicon Valley area/region since I was a kid. I always felt like I was too young or left out of the early web boom (for better or worse). I'd probably love to move to San Francisco and get involved with some sort of start-up related work related to either web, tech, or finance.
However, I'm sort of torn as in a poor job market I'm lucky enough to attend a school with a nice almuni network and great recruiting right out of school. About 70% of my business school are finance majors and a great deal of them all go to Wall Street or the top Management Consulting Firms. I could see myself potentially doing that as I like finance, the markets, strategy, and the whole nature of closing and making big deals... but have this nagging feeling that if it weren't for the money or prestige that isn't what I would want to spend my life doing. I felt some of PG's essays pointed this out rather well. When I did startup work... it just didn't feel like work and my currently internship feels a lot like work. However the paycheck is nice...
So, any ideas on what I should do with my remaining "vacation" from the real world in college or what I should do with the 100,000 in the bank? Any ideas on what to do after college?
Note: At the same time I can't help feeling how out of wack this question is with a world where many live on a $1 a day and a global GDP per capita of about $10,000/year and how lucky I am to have the opportunities I have had (especially on the 4th of July here in the U.S). It's something I've always felt a bit guilty about even though I've worked hard, because so many never had the chance that I had. For that very reason I've always had that sort of nagging feeling to really make the best use of what I've been given; hence this question.