you don't say whether you're trying to decide if you're going to skip the schooling and jump into the real world. but it doesn't matter. here is what you do.

go to school. get a student job as a consultant/help desk. see stuff that could be fixed and fix it. find the most boring repetitive tasks and automate them.

if you are good, you will be noticed, you'll be appreciated, and you'll be promoted as far as you can stand.

this sounds like a grandiose promise, it may be, but 4 or 5 years ago i was hired to punch ethernet connections and help lusers with their winblows machines. now i'm network diety for some 40,000 people. i would think it's a fluke, but i've seen 3 others go from consultant/student slave to well respected for their abilities and piled with responsibilities and hired full time. now they run giant High Performance Computing Clusters (and they get to program in whatever suits them...)

not all universities may be the same, but from what i can tell from my peers at other universities is that it's about the same there as here.

you won't get paid as much, but pick the right university and you'll have neat expensive things to play with that i doubt you'll ever see in the real world as a newbie, at least not for another 6 years or so. you won't likely have to dress up and wear a tie either.

so go to school. work for the geeks. you'll find many a project to work on. higher education is a nice field to work in, i would say it's right up there with getting paid to work on open source (and in some cases the same).