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peter_hurford comments on What should a college student do to maximize future earnings for effective altruism? - Less Wrong
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The highest earning careers generally* are medicine, law, and finance. For medicine, you'll need a specific major (biology and chemistry, usually). For law, you can have any major. For finance, you can have any quantitative major. Thus, I'd recommend you either go medicine or not medicine and pick either biology/chemistry, math/economics, math/computer science, or economics/computer science for your major, depending on skills and interest.
Don't worry as much about overloading your coursework as getting good grades in your classes. High GPA matters a lot for law, and somewhat for medicine and finance. Law and finance don't really care too much about what your majors are or what specific classes you've taken.
Take internships as often as possible. I think it's better to take more prestigious internships than internships relevant to your field, but I could be wrong about that.
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This is important, yes. Put some thought into it, but if you're doing things right, in my experience, it should evolve largely naturally. Just make sure to record who you've met and some guesses as to how they could help you. I have a spreadsheet.
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Yes, plus self-direction and management skills, which are more important. Take a leadership position because you're passionate about the club, though, not for overt signaling.
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Depends on the employer and the research / program. Generally these can be high prestige, which is good. But a trading firm probably won't care about your english literature research or research on fern mating cycles, etc. Good research projects do demonstrate you can write and think quantitatively, though, which could be an asset.
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*This might be naïve though, because it doesn't factor in cost of living, social environment, cost of school (especially law and medical school), or amount of hours worked. On a per hour basis, I suspect these jobs aren't as high income as they seem.
I'd think carefully about law school. Also, does it have any automation risk?
Why double major instead of doing a bachelor's and then a master's in a different subject? How feasible would it be to get a bachelor's degree in 3 years and a master's degree in 1 year instead of double majoring in 4 years?
Probably, but I don't know much about it.
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This is just an artifact of the school I chose to attend (Denison University, a liberal arts college) where double majors are relatively easy and graduating in 3 years is impossible.
Search engines have eliminated a huge class of work that lawyers did at one point when finding case law. I don't know how much further things can be automated, but that combined with the number of people who see dollar signs when they think about law school makes it a bad choice these days.
You left out entrepreneurship, which is (expected value) financially better than law or medicine for people with the right profile for all three.
You don't actually need a specific major to go to med school. You just need the pre-reqs, a pretty straightforward sequence of mostly-science that you can cram inside most majors. Bio majors are usually the easiest way to do this.
As I mention elsewhere in the thread, med school is usually debt-funded and costs you earning years in your twenties. And your per-hour income is sometimes surprisingly low.