Ask HN: How can a CS undergrad gain real-world skills?

You could be the best CS student on the planet, but when you start at a company that all goes right out of the window. Not only is it an entirely different environment to academia, you'll (very slowly) discover that what you lack is the soft skills that more experienced programmers may have. You learn how to speak to clients, how to work alongside others in a non-technical setting, how to handle expectations, and most importantly how to say no; the kind of things that just can't be taught properly in academia.

I interned at a medium-sized company where I live, not expecting anything too great. I probably learned more in the nine weeks I spent there than I did in an entire year at university. Sure, I went to a crappy university, but I've worked alongside people from top universities (Oxford/Cambridge/ICL/UCL) that really struggled. They had their own issues alongside my own. They went into work as top students in their class, solving fairly complex problems, to maintaining a crappy web app that would fall over twice a day because the company that originally built it did it under an unrealistic timeframe, and dealing with clients that couldn't care less than Newy McNewerson had written a Raytracer in C++ over the weekend, because their site was down during a sale.

I cannot recommend internships enough. It'll kill some time over the summer break, you'll earn some money, and it'll set you apart from most of your peers.