I got hired out of my college's career fair. My boss said I stood out because I actually cared about the field. I was an officer in the college's Linux Users Gr

I got hired out of my college's career fair. My boss said I stood out because I actually cared about the field. I was an officer in the college's Linux Users Group. I had side projects. I could talk about technical things I hadn't taken courses for, I read technical books for fun. I had a string of part-time/summer technical jobs already. I showed interest in learning more. Nearly everyone else they saw at the career fair did exactly the technical tasks their courses required and not much else. I had three friends who got hired into Google upon graduation. They spent a lot of times on things like the Facebook Hacker Cup, studying graph theory, learning things from obscure programming languages or 40 year old research papers. One was in both the LUG and robotic flight club, doing big competitions. Their GitHubs didn't look as much like side projects, but they still published whatever code they wrote. They'd focused hard on skill building that was highly relevant in challenging technical contexts. So that's my suggestion to stand out: show that you care about your craft, not just meeting assignments. Juniors are hired based on who they can be molded into, as much as for any skill they already have. Example: if you want to go into game development, see if you can give a talk at a game conference sometime during your degree. If you nail the talk, show something original and intriguing, make it quality and memorable, you'll get access to job opportunities where you're treated like a competent professional instead of a dime-a-dozen fresh graduate. A degree takes long enough to do something novel that's worth presenting.