[gamacodre]

Mine happened a long time ago and the industry was very different, but there are echoes of it in some of the other comments here. I'd say, build a project and ship it to customers. The feelings of accomplishment and agency from doing that were a tremendous boost to me. Even though I knew my code was iffy at best.

It's fine if you're collaborating with someone else or a team, as long as there are some good-sized chunks in there that you can point to and say "I did that part." Your customer might only be a different team in your company. The point is that you created something that had an impact on other people.

PS I'd also suggest: Take some time and build something small in assembly language. Getting even a bit of a feeling for how the CPU actually interacts with memory and registers and math and branching will give you a completely different perspective on higher-level languages.