Unless you're positive you want to go the academic route, I'd highly recommend working for a year or so first, and I don't mean as an intern. I remember folks f

Unless you're positive you want to go the academic route, I'd highly recommend working for a year or so first, and I don't mean as an intern. I remember folks from my M.S. who came straight from undergrad, and by and large they had trouble with the sort of things that you'd simply know if you'd worked on production code before. For example, in a database architecture class, one student actively argued with me on theoretical grounds (chiefly that it breaks the concept of defined primary keys) when I pointed out that it's common for commercial RDBMS's to be able to create autoincrementing identity columns for tables. Another student opened up separate copies of Eclipse for each file he wanted to edit, and then asked me why he was having performance issues on his machine. I know that computer science != programming, but you can get a significant amount of knowledge from just a small investment in time in the "real world", and that knowledge may prove quite useful later in your studies.