'Keep your mouth shut and your ears open and you'll be all right," my nan told me when I started my first job after graduation. But it was alright for her to say that. It's easy for students and recent graduates who are terrified of putting a foot wrong to clam up when they start work, feeling uncertain of what - if anything - they have to offer an employer when they have so little experience.
But what if you look at the time spent at university in a different way: not just as a scheme for getting a piece of paper to wave under an employer's nose, but as an opportunity to build an area of specialist expertise that will make you a highly sought-after resource?
This relies on adopting a somewhat more focused attitude to higher education than spending 36 consecutive months alternating trips to the pub with, well, more trips to the pub. And it's not about spending endless hours in the library either: much better to find something in your course that truly engages your interest, or an extra-curricular activity that you really love - and then commit to getting very, very good at it. Three years, after all, is a decent stretch of time in which to discover a particular passion and to develop a good degree of skill.
You don't have to be the kind of mathematical genius who dreams up a multibillion dollar idea such as Google, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did 10 years ago while students. Realising that, even as an undergraduate, you can be good at something that is relevant, useful and possibly even lucrative in the "real" world can, however, mean taking inspiration and motivation from events that happen in your own life.
When 23-year-old Alastair Rzeznicki's grandmother died of a hospital-acquired MRSA infection, the then third-year student was doing a degree in content creation for broadcasting and new media at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. Shocked at his own lack of knowledge of the basic measures required to keep infection at bay, Rzeznicki decided to focus his final-year dissertation on whether the new media skills he had built up through his degree might be of any help in addressing the problem.
Discovering that government-led publicity around hospital cleanliness amounted to no more than a poster campaign about handwashing, "and from my research I found out that infection control is about far more than that", Rzeznicki began to look at what he could offer his local hospital to enable them to better help staff, visitors and patients understand how to prevent bacterial spread.
"With the internet and other new media devices available for us to educate, entertain, and remind people of what it is they can do to help reduce infections, it seems absurd that we are not using these methods," he says. "Visual triggers aren't necessarily as widely, or as creatively, in use as they could be, so I knew that anything I made had to engage and entertain people of all ages and at all levels if it was going to have a chance to educate."
After contacting his local hospital's infection control team, he persuaded them that he could design a brand of cartoon characters that would work in different formats - posters, animated adverts, webcasts and video clips that could be sent to mobile phones when people arrived in the hospital car park - to remind them of steps they could take to reduce the infection risk.
The result was an animated character with revolting nose-picking habits who smeared germs in various unsavoury ways around a hospital setting, finishing with a visual prompt to remind people what both to do and what not to do. This can be played in waiting rooms, staff rooms and hospital cafes, and after being approached by Rzeznicki, the Princess Royal United Hospital in London is now using the video as part of its training programme for staff. An award of £5,000 from Ravensbourne subsequently allowed Rzeznicki to develop and pilot a schools workshop in association with Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust.
"What was really impressive, quite apart from the quality of the idea and its execution, was the planning," says his lecturer at Ravensbourne, Steve Colwell. "The access he gained and engaging in really tricky negotiations with staff in the hospital, that's a hard thing to pull off. But there he was, fresh out of the box, conducting a very sophisticated conversation with professionals. He managed to be accorded a respect that is difficult for young people, and he got a foot not just in the door but through the door."
These negotiation skills required to overcome obstacles - and other people's doubts - in a "real world" context are crucial, Colwell notes, because "if you don't have them, you won't get anywhere."
A fascination for your idea or project will only carry you so far, though - unless you're prepared to stir some blood, sweat and tears into the mix.
Blogging is a bandwagon that plenty of people have hopped on, but combine this with considerable IT expertise, a fascination with what makes a great news story, an eye to the future of online journalism and a lot of hard work that won't be credited to your degree result, and you get Dave Lee.
The 20-year-old final-year journalism student has been acclaimed by media commentator Roy Greenslade as "probably Britain's leading student journalist blogger". As a result of his frequent, pithy and combative blogs discussing the practicalities, ethics, visual impact and timing issues around how news should be reported on the web, Lee was last October invited by the Whitireia Journalism School to fly to Wellington, New Zealand to help it establish and teach its soon-to-be launched online journalism diploma.
Why would they approach someone who has not even graduated in his subject to help set up a brand new course teaching other students?
"This is one of those situations where long experience and the wisdom that supposedly accrues simply don't apply," says Jim Tucker, the lecturer responsible for developing Whitireia's new multimedia diploma, and who approached Lee initially.
"I have a couple of Google Alerts on journalism education and multimedia journalism and Dave's blog popped up earlier this year. The more I read him the more I was convinced he has a good grasp of the changes that are engulfing traditional journalism. The Alerts throw up a lot of interesting debate and information about the future of journalism, but Dave's analysis seems more astute than most."
As well as keeping abreast of new thinking around online journalism and updating his blog, Lee is a founder editor of student paper The Linc and says he barely has time to do his coursework. But he makes the point that it's going the extra mile that counts.
"I think a lot of this New Zealand thing happening, and having been paid to write articles on technology by the national press, is down to the fact that I'm really interested in the subject," he says. "The majority of people I study with learn what they're being taught; I try to think about how it might change or be better."
The thing is, it's not like work if it's fun - you'll spend more time on it and get better at it. Use your time at university to uncover your particular personal passion and you could end up with sought-after expertise - and a job - that's about far more than the standard nine to five.