Yeah I had the same ideas when I was in school, but life consistently gets in the way. I took a year off to be with my GF who was going to school on the other side of the country. The job market was an utter wasteland. Nobody was hiring. At one point I resorted to going through the phone book. After 3 months of job hunting, I had two options: stock boy at Meijers (if you're not familiar, it's like Walmart) or software engineer at a small software company with a crappy boss working on software that didn't matter to anyone. By that point I had to choose one of those jobs, I could not afford (literally, monetarily) to be picky.<p>I took the programming job, and although it sucked, I got a lot of experience out of that job and am a better programmer today because of it. As horrible as it was, it probably sucked less than stocking shelves at Meijer would have, and I certainly got a lot more value out of it.