**You should just mentor yourself**. When you’re doing computer science in the university there’s a point where teachers can’t teach you anymore, no better than you can teach yourself anyway.

The thing is, in order to learn, you need basically experience and to get experience you need to **do things that are useful**. This is not math therefore theory can only work for you to a certain extent.

First: **have interest, try to learn everything you can** by reading other opinions, for example add some of this blogs to your usual reading, they won’t teach specific things but will give you useful advices that you will remember when you need them, you won’t remember the exact thing but you will think “I know I read something about this and there was a really cool method for doing this”.

Second: **Program on your spare time**. Find a project you like (an obtainable project not some unreachable objective like programming the new Quake 4) and do it until you finish it. Practice, practice and practice, a lot of problems arise when you make even the simplest programs. Experience let you recognice patterns and adapt them to new situations. If you’ve done something similar in the past then you’ll do the new thing twice faster.

Third: **Share, comment and try to explain things**. One of the best things you can do is start your own programming blog. Try to explain others how to do things, you’ll find it’s a lot harder than you think. You may think you know how to do something but when you try to explain how it’s done and why, you end up doing a lot of research and actually learning how and why is done on the process.

Finally: **You will start developing your own thoughts an opinions that diverge the usual thinking or the opinions of the rest of the people. Share them.** Create a blog or whatever and express your new opinions. You’ll get feedback and will continue learning for it. For example, I read both Joel and Jeff blogs, sometimes I agree and sometimes I don’t. When I don’t, I either post to say why not or blog about it and in the process I always learn something, maybe through comments I end up changing my mind and that too is a good thing.

from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/94579/how-to-find-a-mentor/596714