First year CS student

hi /prog/
I am a first year student and I want to make myself as marketable as possible once I graduate. We started our first class learning to program in Java but I feel like the stuff we learned would be pretty useless elsewhere. so, what language should I try learning on my own now?

>>23

No, where I work we make web and desktop applications for the financial sector. People get turned down for having CS degrees for 1 of 2 reasons:
1. We don't hire real computer scientists. We don't need computer science. We need computer software engineers. Example: We have apps that do Monte Carlo simulations. A computer scientist would develop a pseudo-random number generator for that simulation. We don't need a new implementation of a fucking random number generator, plenty already exist. We need an engineer to implement a random number generator.

2. Many poor schools teach computer software engineering but call it CS (which it is not). If the school doesn't know the difference, then their education is generally crap. These are the kinds of schools that teach Visual Basic 6 as a class still. VB6 died 6 years ago, it is legacy and not in high demand in the marketplace. There is no fucking reason to learn it. They should be teaching VB.Net which is a different language with a simialr syntax. I see this too often.