Well, bizarrely, my internship hunt for this summer is actually going pretty well. Got about 4 companies I'm interviewing with at this point, one of which is The One that I absolutely want to work for. Not as a Final Career Destination or anything, but I think they do some of the best and most interesting work on Earth, so I'm very interesting in seeing how they've built a business out of the stuff.

CS academia is less scammy than other disciplines, because of the high-quality exit options. You're not doing wrong by going for the MSc. That's a good call.

Actually, in this case I think it's a good idea because even the coursework here seems very devoted to building artifacts. This semester's project in my Coursework Course is building a static analyzer for LLVM IR of C code. Next semester I'm going to try to take Advanced Operating Systems, in which project groups build a small OS from the ground up.

These aren't exactly start-ups, but they're the kind of coursework that generates project code which you can throw on Bitbucket and use as proof not only that You Can Code but that You Can Do Advanced/High-Level Work.

Surprisingly, my undergrad institution wasn't very good at that.