I wish I knew what I wanted to have studied when I went to college, so that I could have hit the ground running, with a goal in mind. Instead I took a year and half before I had settled on a major of physics. It seems that some people had a better idea of what to get out of college, but that seems largely dependent on their parents, where they grew up, and what part of the internet they lived in. I don't feel like I had a good understanding of what different jobs and careers were like.

So for classes, I took more chemistry than I would have liked, but that doesn't bother me that much, as it was interesting and still relevant to some of my physics classes.

What does bother me, is that I spent a lot of time taking classes that I thought I should take, instead of classes I wanted to take. I thought that doing theoretical physics was a bad idea because of job / grad school prospects (probability of getting a professorship is low) so I took lab classes and did laboratory research that I didn't like as much, and did worse in, than theory classes. I still ended up doing theory in my spare time, and instead of research / laboratory work, but it was at the expense of that work, rather than purely additive. I was thinking that following my 'passion' was a bad idea, but I think that if i did so and did theory it could have worked out better - I would have been happier, and had a better resume in the end.

I have a lot of strong opinions about the physics curriculum, and wish that it had more programming, and less redundancy. I'm not familiar with how physicists get good at modeling or data-science, and can't think of any undergraduates from my school who got much experience with this. But that seems like it would have been a good thing.

Something cool to have learned would be "practical mindsets and values". For a long time I had an idea of that as long as I was learning things, that was great and all I needed to care about. This served me well, but eventually I was introduced to the idea of "get shit done" which was also very useful.