I'm not in the industry, or in college, or even out of highschool, but I think if it's possible try to get your foot into a small shareware game that won't take more than a few months of development.

From this you [possibly] can get

1.) A completed game to your name

2.) Experience working with others (hopefully)

3.) Profit and success (which you might not get, but if you do it's definitely a big plus)

You might even pickup some human relations and marketing skills.

Of course, since you only have one year left in college before you need to find a permanent job you'll this option to gain experience might not be feasible.

Anyways, Goodluck getting into the industry!

I saw an advert in a games paper for Producers at a publisher called Telecomsoft (owned by British Telecom). Didn't know what one was but applied anyway. Didn't get the job but they did offer me a job as a tester. Six months later I was running the test department. My boss left soon after and then called me and asked if I wanted a better job - it was Development Manager at a small start-up company (Didn't know what a development manager did either). I said yes and was employee number 5 or 6 at The Sales Curve Ltd (now SCi/Eidos).

Of course that was 20 years ago and it was so much easier to get into the industry then.

I managed to convince my thesis supervisor that "interactive 3D simulation" was a valid thesis to work on, then spent the last year of college neglecting all my other courses in favor of my little game :) Did a bunch of articles of it, talking about the tech and tutorials, then brought the game along to a job-interview a local company was having.

Has been good fun; haven't regretted going into games in the 8 years I've been doing it :)

Allan

Full post here.

Breaking in
Around the start of my dissertation, I really started to get my ass in gear about job hunting. This time, I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes and I really was out to get one this time. My CV was tweaked to various degrees and my portfolio was now in a presentable format and high quality thanks to the MSc.

With help from other course mates, finding the companies to apply directly to was much easier and I was receiving interviews in a much higher frequency as before as I was more pro-active in chasing applications. However, thanks to my lack of core fundamentals of a traditional Computer Science degree, this really hampered my performance during technical interviews. I did my best to learn from my rejections of the skills I was lacking and work my way towards fixing the holes in my knowledge.

Eventually, I got a call from one of the companies that I was rejected from for a different position, level scripting/integration contract role and they needed someone on short notice. Here I was left with a dilemma, would I accept the interview knowing full well that this isn’t the position nor salary I was aiming for purely to get my foot in the industry and some experience or do I wait it out for a better role.

I took it as I was getting desperate at this point, had the interview the next day and came out of it with a good feeling. The salary was reasonable as it was enough to live off and the location and benefits made it even more attractive. By the end of the day, I had the offer which I promptly accepted and I started work the following week. I was now officially in the games industry.

Moving up
I joined at the same time as a group of graduates for the same role so it was kind of cool being with the same group of people in similar positions of experience and education. Even though it was a contract role, we knew there was a possibility of a full time position at the end of it so quite frankly, I made sure that I worked my ass off to make the most of it.

Every opportunity where I could learn something new, I took advantage of and understood everything I was doing. In my monthly meetings with my lead, I made it known that I wanted to move into a permanent programming position and in return, he kept me aware of opportunities that would arise that allowed me to prove my worth. The fact that I really enjoyed working with the team meant that this was so much easier to do so as I really wanted to help them complete the game the way they wanted it to be.

Looking back, I believe it was around the run up to final that I really started to make my mark in the team as I was going at full steam killing bugs and implementing last minute gameplay features at a ridiculous speed. The fact that my lead was going even faster felt that I was being led by example rather then being passed a ton of work.

Eventually, it all paid off, at the end of the project I was given a permanent role at the company as a programmer.