I am a QA engineer and was hired straight out of college, before i had much of an idea about what QA was. What i will suggest is understand what are the differe

I am a QA engineer and was hired straight out of college, before i had much of an idea about what QA was. What i will suggest is understand what are the different types of testing -functional, performance, reliability , security etc, play with testing tools(I haven't personally tried Selenium but i have heard its pretty popular).Continue to try your hand at programming, as automation will be a huge part of your job as a QA engineer and programming questions are asked in QA interviews. You can also go through Alan Page's blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alanpa/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alanpa/ . I think you will find them interesting. That said as mentioned by other people in the comments, the job becomes monotonous after a while. The most exciting parts of the job will involve programming. Though you will find most of your bugs manually, continuously going through the same set of tests will exhaust you mentally after a while. Talk to some QA engineers near by and understand the job little better before you jump into it. Hoping this helps.