A diploma can get you in the door. What you can actually do decides whether you stay in the room.

Credentials are a filter, not a description. They get your name past the first cut, and after that you are standing in a room where the question is what you can do with your hands and your head. People discover this gap at different speeds. The ones who noticed early spent their study years building the second thing as well as the first.

While you are earning the paper, build something that is not the paper. A project, a portfolio, a skill somebody could hire on its own. One real thing you made carries a surprising amount of weight in a conversation.