I finished school, uh... like... 11 years ago. Best advice I can give is have goals but go where life takes you.
I went to college for English and then bounced around a few places for the next few years. After that, I worked at a Verizon call center for about 5 1/2 years and moved a little up the chain there. It was actually a pretty good job and calls never really got to me that much because I wanted to help people even if they were being jerks (and jerks give you GREAT stories to tell people), but eventually I wanted to move out of the town I was living in and find something else as Verizon itself was good, but the people I worked for were not.
I ended up at a place one of my other former VZW-buddies knew about, which was a small security software company, and now I run their QA department for their customer service/tech support branch! It's been a ton of fun because I got to put the department together from the ground up, and when time came for someone to run it, I ended up getting the spot (Which, granted, created a fair amount of drama between me and the other co-founder, which was a bummer). I love my job. My team is a group of people who wants to help their coworkers help our end users, and they're all funny, nerdy, interesting people. We have entirely too much fun at work.
Part of me still wishes I wrote full time, but I love my life and my job--while not insanely lucrative or anything--affords me with the level of comfort that I like and keeps me in new robots and tamas pretty consistently. Besides that, I still write plenty, with 3 books under my belt and a bunch of short stories floating around the internet. It'd be cool to make money off of it, but I really have no regrets; I love what I do both at and outside of work, and nothing is ever really dull anymore.
And that's what I meant at the start; I didn't set out to do what I do now, I was never someone who really led or was good at talking to other people, but I took the opportunities that appeared along the way and really found what I loved about everything I did to make something that I really, really adore. I tell my team all the time that one line from Mary Poppins: "In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and snap! The job's a game." It's so true, and if you can pull that off, every day is just moving from one game to another.