Get paid to find bugs: Get a job in QA or test engineering. Seriously, pay is better, as are job security and success rate. I got my start in industry as the

Get paid to find bugs: Get a job in QA or test engineering. Seriously, pay is better, as are job security and success rate. I got my start in industry as the testing guy for a fairly small contract software house. I started following the instructions on someone else's testing plan, then eventually graduated to doing my own testing plans, from design to execution. For someone in his last year of undergrad/right out of school, it afforded decent pay, good job security, and great industry experience. Furthermore, it made me a far better coder, because it gave me a crash course in how to try to break things. It gave me a better sense of where and when software tends to break. As a result, the software I write is much more reliable than it would otherwise.