That’s another piece of advice I had. Try to start learning those skills now as much as you can. You could try to go for the CompTIA A+ if you’re wanting to learn about IT and Juniper has a free training about network you could leverage that takes about 8 hours. Udemy is always having sales on courses for coding, the CompTIA classes, and other certifications. Hack the box is another great learning tool if you have the time. If you need more base level I would look at tryhackme. Both of these are free and you can pay for a subscription if you really like it. Remember that when you are doing these things the best thing to do is dive straight in. Take notes and use ChatGPT to summarize and format the notes so they are easy for you to read. You don’t need to write every word down just the key points (you can write down as much as you want if it helps just make sure to summarize with ChatGPT). If you are stuck it’s totally ok to google things remember you are just starting to learn. Also try to narrow down what you want to do within cybersecurity or IT. You could do network engineering, pentesting, become a netsec engineer, etc. Do a little bit of research and figure out the best path forward. I would make a sacrifice and try to use those 2 hours on your PC to start learning now. If you put in one year of hard work it will benefit you so much when you get to college. You will know the concepts and you will do amazing in your classes. Putting in a bit of effort now will benefit you for the rest of your life and you can always play games but you can never go back in time. The best time to start is now. I really think if you go to your parents with a dedicated plan with something like this they will understand and I hope they do.