First, find your school's career center. Every undergrad has the same problem, and your school will try to help you get established -- look for an internship th

First, find your school's career center. Every undergrad has the same problem, and your school will try to help you get established -- look for an internship this summer if there's time. Companies are wary of unemployed, inexperienced twentysomethings, but they do like hiring right out of school, often. You're allowed to list open-source projects on your resume. It looks good to the people you'd want to work with. Give some indication of popularity, if it's non-zero -- recruiters like having real data to look at. The main thing they'll ask you about in the interview is you final project at school, so make sure you feature it on your resume, and be ready to tell an exciting story about it during the interview. Big orgs are usually harder to join than small companies; they tend to waste a lot of applicants' time in vetting. So don't worry about getting caught up in the machine; it's avoidable. Small, newish companies are easier to join, but harder to actually find and apply to. There are lots of recruiters floating around on the web, such as cybercoders -- remember that programmers are in demand, and there's a huge turnover rate in the first few years out of school, so companies looking for people like you are always hiring. Certifications are worthless if you already have a Bachelor's degree in CS or IS. Sometimes they're helpful for straight IT/sysadmin jobs, but only if the employer doesn't know what else to look for. A certification means you can do that kind of grunt work, nothing more. There's demand for every language in TIOBE's top 50. Yes, you can get work in Lisp if you're looking in the right places. But be careful about whoring yourself out too much right now -- if you establish yourself as a COBOL maintainer, recruiters will want you to spend the rest of your career maintaining COBOL systems. Java hiring seems very keyword-oriented, and that makes me feel a bit like a rat in a wheel, because the keywords change every year. Database knowledge will get you pretty far; Ruby and PHP have plenty of demand. Also, there's a lot more programming work to be done than you'd think -- web apps are only a tiny portion of it. Your resume is what initially proves your competence in a language or system; in the interview they may quiz you on some specifics and have you write some basic code, but for an entry-level job, it won't be that hardcore. Remember how to do some sorting, reversing, maybe data-structure traversal in C++ (no library), and you're golden.