This applies to any college, but an important thing to do with CC + state university is to pick a good location for your field. I'm graduating from a state university in a part of NY that isn't the city, and because of my location, I've not been able to have a single internship, or any other in person relevant work experience at all. Here's a screenshot I took a while ago: http://i.imgur.com/5vnfuY6.png

This is for a region that encompasses at least 10 counties and a population of over 3 million. But there's a big problem there: it's not NYC. The one internship that I was able to apply to was with the local power company, which I found through my school's jobs/internships section on its website, which ended up being a dubious thing that accepts applications from any major. Of course I didn't get it, being in my third year, having an amount of side projects (handmade emulators, assemblers, games, etc) and group work experience with online collaborative projects (large online projects involving multiple languages/frameworks/version control systems) far above the norm for students around here in the 3rd year, having a good gpa, etc - they either weren't accepting computer science students in the first place, or someone else in compsci got it who either had more experience or had connections inside the company.

I have to say that the classes I took at the CC and the state university were generally informative/interesting and well-taught, and the schools were nice in a lot of other ways, but the location is doing me in. The one and only person looking for anything programming-related at the career fair was someone who needed something done about an old database backend on their website that the original developers left in a broken state, and of course I never heard back from them after giving them my resume I had to spend all that time making and printing just for that one occasion.

Some will suggest remote work as a response to this problem, but in practice it's extremely rare to actually find real remote work that isn't a scam and/or someone trying to get you to work for free (this one specifically happened to me after I finally thought I found a real taker posting on the reddit online job subreddit for a while - some guy with a shady company that had changed names for years with some vague description full of meaningless technobabble, offering to pay in equity that would never materialize to anything), as someone still in college without work experience.

Now because of my location, I'm going to be at a significant disadvantage when I do move to a suitable location after graduating and try to find work. From what I've read from a lot of sources, graduating without any internships is one of the worst things you can do. I might not even find anything at all once I graduate unless I come up with some viable startup idea, and even then that'll probably just give me even more debt.

If I'd gone to college and resided there in NYC or another city in the first place, I would've had opportunities to get the necessary internship experience and I would've ended up with useful connections - recruiters from companies even go to college campuses to recruit sometimes, but only in major cities. You hear about people graduating with jobs in these companies secured already, but it's always a college somewhere like the middle of silicon valley.

Now, I'm in a position where it's questionable if I'll even be able to get that first programming job before the time since graduating becomes large enough to be a major red flag. I could easily be permanently unemployable in programming if posts like this are to be believed: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4yfcc0/i...

At least the minimum payments for federal student loans are easily manageable with retail or fast food wages if you live with your parents, if it comes to that.