Honestly you shouldn't freelance right after school unless you already had a significant amount of experience and projects under your belt. That has no reflect

Honestly you shouldn't freelance right after school unless you already had a significant amount of experience and projects under your belt. That has no reflection on whether you have the right technical skills or not. It is simply that you need project experience, mentoring and time seeing how things really work versus what you get taught in schools. As for working for free. No, unless it is for a charity or non profit etc. working for free is a lot of times harder then being paid as your time won't be valued the same. There are exceptions for people doing some marketing of their skills etc. If you want to build up some credibility and get some experience, help out on an open source project or two.