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At the time it was mostly just fun for me, sounds like the situation is the same for him. I think it's a balance, you want to pursue your interests to the point where they show your ability, but also deal with enough of the BS required to get into good schools (like studying for the SATs or getting good grades in HS classes).

College is a great idea because it's entirely possible his interests will change in school (I almost switched majors like 3 times) and for everything other than programming, college is still a prerequisite.

Edit: Oh when I was 17 I also thought applicants were super prepared and it was intimidating. In reality most kids at elite schools didn't have a scary level of preparation, and a lot of those kids with perfect resumes never got in. Admissions are still a mystery to me.

I had an engineering internship when I was 14. Definitely missed out on whatever kids my age were doing that summer, but I was too much of a nerd to even have wanted to do anything else. I think it worked out for the better, and I hope it does for Shalin too.

To Shalin: Kill those SAT's and get into the school of your dreams. It is absolutely worth it.

Yeah, web development is certainly in high demand, but I think the experience in other domains would make a better programmer overall.

I would encourage her to try things other than web development. Make a desktop application, or a program in C, or do some performance coding on an embedded system, or write a webserver from scratch, or wrestle with writing a program with multiple threads. You might say this is too much to expect from a beginner, but no one would have said that 20 years ago. It only seems hard because of how easy web development is today.

Nowadays we have so much scaffolding to work from that it's easy to mistake results for software engineering skill. Many of these projects are mash-ups.

I do admire her dedication, it's a rare quality, but I can't help but think this is the easy way out. Or maybe I'm just getting old.