Yeah, thats the kind of thing. If you want to stand out to your employers, I highly recommend doing work exposure, or side projects. It shows to them that you are A) enthusiastic, B) some way along in terms of learning the practical skills you need.
What I mean by the last part, is that university probably wont teach you much of what you actually need to program for a career. Not really a failing on university's part, more that the focus is different. Programming as a career requires good troubleshooting and debugging skills, most of which you wont learn at university because you just dont program enough. At university, even in third year I wasnt programming all the time. Most of my time was spent in lectures, in practicals for other subjects that didnt require programming, or simply wasted. At work, I program (and here I mean debug code as well as actually write it) all day. Thats a lot more time spent coding, and that means I've had to learn a lot of tricks to solve problems that I just didnt encounter in university.
I hear you asking, "Well if thats the case, whats the point in university?" Because I wouldnt be half as good at it if I didnt have that background. There is just so much to know, so much that you need to know to be good. Anyone can write code, but writing maintanable object oriented code that conforms to a particular pattern is hard. Its even harder when you are expected to learn a particular language on the job, as is often the case in real life. Had I not studied a lot of languages, and spent a lot of time thinking about good practice instead of just writing code, I dont think I could do it. Or at least, not as well.
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