This might get a bit long - I am trying to get a lot of this sorted out myself but some thoughts<p>1. University, certainly the good ones, have two goals - to grow the next generation of Professsors whose research will give multiple orders of magnitude payback to society, and to grow more rounded, more stable highly trained "future leaders". It's still a fairly reasonable approach, and I would strongly advise you to stick with the opportunity to grow and experience more as a young human than you will get almost any other time.<p>So, do work hard, but also sleep around, take time to travel cheaply in the long holidays, meet interesting people not because they might be useful in your future career, but because they are interesting. Sleep with some of them !<p>2. Portfolios and networking - it's a bit blah! I would recommend that you do two things - experiment with different languages, build interpreters or compilers (start with a simple text markdown, build you own DSL) and just as importantly contribute to some open source projects - get your hands dirty with documentation, test frameworks, source code screw ups and bug triages.<p>If you want to impress me with your just out of college CV then proving you can work well with other professional developers, can put a decent commit together and not piss off my senior leads is useful, and demonstrating that you can look square at the trade offs with functional and OO, what makes life hard when building an interpreter and knowing how to go from AST <i>back to source code</i><p>Well that will get you the interview at least<p>Below is a long email / blog-post-to-be that was in response to a similar question from a Greek graduate (and temporary taxi driver)<p>(Ok that's too long for HN submit form ... It will get rewritten and posted somewhere - but really - work hard, work with other people, work on gettin breadth of experience and why clever people have not yet settled on one language - and don't forget to meet interesting people and sleep with them (now my favourite phrase of the day)