Advice to a Marketing student

Was recently asked by a young man studying for a Marketing degree (just finished year 1) whether they should finish their degree or get a job and study CIM courses. I offered the following advice:

I think getting a degree is vital. Once you have it, you have it. CIM & experience with no degree will not give you an edge against people who more often than not will have both plus the degree. Once you have your degree you can then study CIM etc and believe me the studying never ends, one way or another. The key is to study something you enjoy.

I work in online marketing and would strongly advise you specialise there. Everything is heading digital. Take as many courses in that direction as possible. The best advice I could give to anyone heading into communications in any form would be:

To be in communications you need to be a communicator:
Go to blogger.com (there are other platforms but this is the easiest) and start a blog. Pick an obsession you have: a food, a singer, a sports team, whatever. Then blog/write about it, help people find out more about it, post links and so on. Get into the community of people that surround that topic/obsession. Get into blogging, read about what makes a good blog and a good blogger. Obsess about it. Learn about tagging: start an account on www.stumbleupon.com. Get into twitter.com. Start networking and building up your capacity to project yourself. Learning to market you is the place to start.

What would you have said? I will pass your advice on to him...