I’m a huge believer in people doing projects they care about. Learn the basics. Learn the best tools. Then try doing projects. I’m not sure if I’m suitably unbiased in this, but I have to say that I think learning Mathematica is a really good start. It depends on your detailed interests, but I certainly think NKS is a really interesting area that connects to a huge number of things. And what’s great about it is that it’s such a new field that it’s still very easy to make interesting discoveries in it. A general piece of advice about careers is to pick an area that’s small and young now, but you think is going to expand. We’re thinking of doing more directly in education, particularly emphasizing projects. Two initiatives we have are: https://education.wolfram.com/summer/school/ and https://education.wolfram.com/summer/camp/programs/overview/ Another direction is: https://www.computerbasedmath.org/