'I missed a lot': Bill Gates regrets not partying and going to football games at Harvard

Gates isn't the only ultra-successful person to reflect in their later lives about how new experiences and people could have been more beneficial than hitting the books.

"In college, I wish I'd known that it's less important to focus on what you want to be, and more important to focus on what you want to learn through experience," Amy Bohutinsky, chief operating officer at Zillow, told Business Insider in January. "The most interesting and fulfilling careers take lots of left and right turns, and it takes curiosity, openness and occasional failure to create the best opportunities."

Classmates aren't the only interesting folks to meet in college. Author and speaker Laura Vanderkam, who attended Princeton, said she wished she had networked with professors, speakers and alumni.

"Simply being a student is a great networking opportunity," Vanderkam told Business Insider in January. "People are almost always willing to answer notes from students and meet with students in a way they won't with 'normal' adults. I wish I'd been more proactive about reaching out to people I wanted to meet who were visiting my university, or had gone there, or had some other connection."

College also provides an opportunity to meet people from diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.

"Simply interacting with individuals who are different forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort," wrote Katherine W. Phillips, senior vice dean at Columbia Business School, in Scientific American in 2014.

"I wish I mixed around a bit more," Gates said. "It was a fun time, though, because there was people around you could talk to 24 hours a day and the classes were so interesting and they fed you."

Watch the hour-long Q&A here.