[jinushaun]

In my experience in the tech industry, experience counts much more than a degree. When I'm hiring, I ignore the education section. The industry is full of self-taught programmers who were programming since middle school. Most computer science freshmen came in already knowing how to code well and getting a degree is just a formality--a check box. In that case, why should their education even factor in the job market?

And if you don't have work experience to speak of, make something! A website, an iPhone app, code hosted on GitHub, etc, speaks volumes. In all honesty, I'm more likely to hire based on that than your resume.

[Brewer]

I haven't made anything yet. How would the source from my course assignments/projects look on GitHub?

[dsmithn]

If you want to go that route, I would recommend picking an assignment you are very interested in, and going all out on it. Even if you get A's on your assignments, they're still probably not that impressive until you can put a few months of extra work into them. Also, if you discuss it with your professor, you have the added potential of building a good relationship with him/her.

Looking back, I really wish I had done something like this because I was in the same boat as you - a lot of motivation to build something, but not knowing what to build.

[Brewer]

Well I meant in addition to any non-school related projects I do. :P The tasks we are asked to perform here are a joke. I recall a problem set last year that went something like this: "You have a Door object that has a state which can be 'open' or 'closed'. Write a mutator method to change the state of the door." What the hell? That was about 2/3 of the way through the course too. I know its a first year course but come one ...