who are you trying to design for? will you design anything for anyone, IE taje blog/forum requests from web sites like this or do you want to deal with providing actual business media?

the thing i never realized about being young and trying to work with business is, you don't under business models at a young age. you can know photoshop like the back of your hand but if you don't understand the business you can't use design skills effectively and no one just knows business models and market conditions. they require a long term study.

edit: my suggestion to anyone who wants to do the later, contact local design firms that have a decent sized staff: at least 3-4+ eployees, and ask if they're interested in using you for web site production.

this means, someone else does all the fun stuff, designing all the different page layouts, and then they pass it onto you to fill it with content. so, if they're doing a school website and have an alumni section, they'll design the page layout, and set the photo/graphics standads then pass it off to you to edit everyone's photo/input the data intot the site. it's not fun, but it gives you real world stuff to study.

most people will probably say no, but web production is a pain, and you might get lucky if someone has a lot going on at once and just doesn't want to do it, or they coincidenlty lost someone.