My point is, in five or ten years, you're not going to look back and say "man, I wish I'd spent more time studying" - no, so long as you graduate with okay marks what really lasts are the relationships you make while you're there (classmates, schoolmates, professors, locals). Get out of your comfort zone, join (or start) some clubs, live life. My 2 cents.
Yeah, "smart and self-motivated" describes such a huge percentage of humanity that I'm amazed colleges and universities haven't gone the way of the dodo.
Getting good at what you do is something that occurs on your own time.
I gained some research skills, learned about advanced computer science topics, and met new people in my field, but there are cheaper ways (including opportunity cost) to do all of those.
I'm of the opinion that you pretty much want a grad degree these days, undergrad has become sort of like high school 2.0.
A masters in CS is a great idea. It's where you sort of dig in and find some depth. I went to a hacking school (UW-Madison back then really pushed you to code, we did a pretty big subset of ADA for the compiler class); that turned out to be good. I also took all the classes needed for a minor in Computer Architecture; that turned out to be super useful over the years.
If you get a TA/RA job, at least back then, they gave you enough to pay for school and housing. Anyone know if that is still true? Even if it is not, I highly recommend teaching. You get a deeper knowledge of the topic when you have to organize it enough to teach it. And teaching is practice for conveying your thoughts, something you'll do a lot if you want to be a leader in your job.
Take two years if you can. I know you can do it one but it's more fun if you take two.
Be willing to be a grunt for some professor if you can be a co-author on a paper. Getting practice at publishing is useful. Again, it's conveying your thoughts, the more practice at that, the better.
Try and step up from your undergrad to a better school for your masters. I taught masters students at Stanford, Stanford loves masters students, they are a big source of money. At least back then, Stanford was pretty liberal about letting in masters students (more so than undergrads).
Have fun, learn, network! Don't forget to sleep and have a beer once in a while :)
Edit: I see that other people are saying it's not worth it. I've got a masters and I absolutely think it was worth it for me. But it was "free" in that what they gave me as a TA/RA was enough to cover tuition and housing, it was about $16K. Times have changed, if what they give you as a TA isn't enough, if you are going to go an extra $100K in debt, yeah, I can see why people would say it's not worth it.
Personally, I loved grad school. If I hadn't been so scared by the qualifiers, I'd have a PhD. If the money part works out, I can't say enough good things about grad school. More learning, more networking, and hey, more summer vacations. You'll be working for a long time without those vacations, enjoy them while you can.
