[strlen]

My advice is "let" yourself be found. One way is to participate in user groups for rapidly growing technologies. That might be Java or Linux in 1996, Ruby in 2004, ObjC in 2008 -- you get the idea. If one doesn't have a car or doesn't live in a area where there are many such groups -- or is simply shy -- online participation will suffice.

Personal story: I had an internship junior and senior years of high school. It was a complete accident: I participated in SVLug (Silicon Valley Linux User Group -- this is when Linux was a "hot new thing") and ran a home server (this was before Rackspace, Linode, et al). Said home server hosted some Perl CGIs and a copy of my resume. I got contacted by a recruiter as a result of my posts to the SVLug mailing list and explained my situation. To my surprise, they chose to interview me anyway.

Another high school classmate also found an internship from SVLug participation. Another high school-age coworker at said company was "discovered" when he wrote a AIM client library (to scratch his own itch -- be able to use AIM in Linux).