Congrats on your graduation, and my compliments for building the skills you have, in those few years of your youth. Commendable!

As a former PR Manager and General Manager of a 45-people company I have hired some 60+ people in 7 years. I am a programmer too, albeit not a very good one, but I had to learn to recognize quality. Sometimes I misread presentation skills for quality, but most of the time I made the right choice.

Some of the programmers and system administrators I hired were easy to recognize as skilled, seeing their list of jobs and projects. But I hired school kids too. How did they convince me of their quality? By demonstrating their skills , showing me the programs they made, the websites they built/maintained. Three times (two school kids and one Cobol-programmer who was switching to Perl) I gave them some homework and asked them to contact me when they were finished with it. Those 3 became highly valued, very loyal and productive employees.

So yes, please prove your skills.