Rant, rant...
I'm going to study electrical engineering in college and I wonder how many F's I will get for simple mistakes like this one lol.
If your EE labs are like the labs I had, you won't get the opportunity to make such mistakes. A lab that requires that you build a circuit with a 16MHz crystal will supply you with a parts kit containing a 16MHz Crystal. It's depressing.
That does mean that the experience you're getting now "fooling around" on your own, will put you "ahead" of your classmates when it comes to debugging circuits, at least if they're trying to get by with just classroom learning.
(my university contacts assure me that labs have "improved" in the 40y since I graduated. But those are like "the Dean of Engineering", and I don't know how good a view they have of how things are going "at ground level.")