Totally as an aside, but for what it’s worth, 20 years ago when I did my degree I gave myself a rule that I would do 1 extracurricular activity every year that I could talk to for 5 minutes in a job interview.

I theorised that over the course of 4 years (5 as it turned out) would give me 20 minutes of talking time.

It worked. Even with average scores (and a handful of fails) I got a well paying job at a top company. Even back in the late 90’s many hiring managers valued experience and personality equally to academic transcripts.

The extracurricular activities were: * organised LAN gaming days for 100 people to teach myself networking, event management, marketing etc. Quake was the game by the way :) * half a day a week work experience for a year at a relevant employer * involvement in a paid capacity at the student association, taking on leadership roles * something else I cannot remember now!

Best wishes for your studies!

It'll help if you learn to network with alumni and pull together a good portfolio for you resume. Consider how balanced your resume looks today and what it's going to look like with only that MS CS program. As you go, investigate what companies are currently looking for and try to balance it with some practical skills that are related to what they are doing. You don't have to program the exact same language, but try to match at the conceptual level. Example: if they used Scala then your Clojure and Java experience is likely enough for them to take a bet on you assuming other fundamentals match up. Things like hackathons etc. might be a good start if you have real world experience today.

It's also good to look for any sort of volunteer position that'll help development of leadership skills. With a master's degree expectations will be that you can develop into a leadership role which doesn't necessarily mean management.

maybe, but you'll still have to interview and do okay. It matters if you are cmu, mit, stanford, berkely, uw (maybe?) but who knows the next tier. this will probably be unpopular but there's so much more demand than available students that just doing a decent job in an interview will yield you all the jobs you could ever want.

Yes.