“Don’t focus on grades beyond what’s required to pass your classes” is tricky — a lot of College/Campus Hiring is selective about both the institutions they will hire from, and the GPA thresholds; if you don’t tick both boxes you likely cannot easily get an internship or graduating offer from e.g. Google, Oracle, or wherever.
Notably, at least a few companies restrict their “Professional Hiring” or “Industry Hiring” teams to candidates with >2 years of post-college professional experience, so the rub then becomes you graduated, didn’t get in, worked somewhere small with the expected “small scale” problems for at least two years, then have to Leetcode and take the arguably harder path into BigTech (which is Industry Recruiting, when you’re not coming from another hyperscaler or notable/known employer).
Is it nonsense that Recruiting filters in this way? Perhaps. Results in losing good candidates? Absolutely. Is the entire recruitment engine a SNR problem? Yes. :)
Internships, Open Source, Hackathons are all excellent advice, as are the other suggestions in thread on building networks, use of office hours!
My quick advice:
- Ask about “Why?” and “When?” and don’t just do the rote exercises which teach you basics about data structures and algorithms.
- Hack on some side projects and have a presence on GitHub, portfolios can be helpful.
- Find a space you enjoy hacking on and find related Open Source, contribute. Maybe that’s something like Home Assistant (nerd out on automating your living space), maybe something else.
- Scratch the itch, humans are all about dopamine hits, all of the above is about gaining experience: this won’t feel like a chore if you’re hacking on something FUN (which is subjective, your itches and others itches will differ). Several people in my 1st Yr CS course weren’t able to find their itch — they’d gone to CS because “they heard it paid well” or “parents said it was a good idea”, they eventually quit, or some persevered and found they hated the jobs professionally, so they had mid-life changes in careers.
- Be curious about Linux, since outside of Microsoft (and even some places in it!) that’s the predominant platform for deploying services, if you can’t navigate Bash and exit vi, you’ll perhaps find your entry into professional settings has a rather steep learning curve!
- Have fun and be social, I know parents say this a lot, but full-time education in a <~ 22 y.o. sense is really the last “minimal responsibility” moments you’ll have in your life.
Disclaimer: I’m a Brit, who now lives in US, and I’ve been a somewhat senior leader at 3-4 huge technology companies in my career, with direct exposure to EIC (early in career) hiring practices.