I'm a current senior Design & Development option at Penn State. The degree is basically worthless in terms of teaching you real software development. I did lear

I'm a current senior Design & Development option at Penn State. The degree is basically worthless in terms of teaching you real software development. I did learn a lot about the social aspects of working for clients and working in teams, but I did not learn the proper structure to actually work on software. I literally spend all of my free time studying software development and computer science, because I know going to school will only yield me a piece of paper that will get me taken more seriously. Here's a list of what I've done: - Learn more languages. Penn State only teaches Java. I've worked professionally with Python, have open source projects in Go, and have read books on Erlang, Haskell, Scala, Clojure. The more languages you know the more abstract concepts you'll know that you can apply in any language. - Watch online lectures in your free time. MIT Open Courseware, UC Berekely, Coursera, YouTube, InfoQ are all really good resources. - Start a reading collection. I have tons of books and white papers downloaded that I read. - Get an interest. I like distributed systems. I honestly don't know much about them, but I think the problems are interesting and I've read some of the important white papers that establish the field. Establishing an interest will help guide you down the rabbit hole. - Get out there and do stuff. Find a project on GitHub or make one with a circle of friends. Pick something outside your comfort zone. Even if the project never sees the light of production use, you'll learn from the experience. Having your name in open source projects AUTHORS/CONTRIBUTORS files is also very nice. I'm getting closer to graduating, so I've been reading up on algorithms and data structures again because I know I need brushing up on it. I'm close to getting a compsci minor and was recently debating just getting a masters in it instead. If you want someone to vent your experiences at PSU, feel free to drop me an email.