I would tell them a couple things: 1) Get involved in communities (like HN, and local CS interest groups) - getting involved while young can lead to many oppor

I would tell them a couple things: 1) Get involved in communities (like HN, and local CS interest groups) - getting involved while young can lead to many opportunities that "just having a CS degree" wont lead you to. 2) Most university CS programs stick to 1 or 2 languages at the core (java or c/c++) - tell them to try and implement some of their homework in ruby / python / or even things like Scala to learn the similarities and differences between programming languages. This will only be more helpful as you progress into higher level courses.