The fear: Everyone is doing more than me!

I am a student, I study software engineering. As a student I spend most of my time studying (a lot more than most of my classmates probably) but still I feel like I am not learning enough. After over 2 years I still feel like a beginner at everything. Of course I have learned a lot, it just never feels like it's enough!

And then I see everyone else in my class. They don't try that hard in school, but some are really good at programming since before and some are very outgoing and nice so there are a lot of people getting programming part time jobs all over.

I was always asking myself how they did it because I am always looking for part time jobs for students in the programming field online but never find anything. Then my friend told me about how one friend did it: networking. Of course. My achilles heel. How will I ever survive this business if I suck at networking? Because I do. Will all my outgoing and talkative friends just get all the nice jobs and I will be left with the scraps?

One of the fears I have is that I wont get a job because I don't have any job experience in software development from during my student time. So if a company gets my resume and the resume from another person in my class who has had a part time job in software engineering, that person is going to seem like the better option. Since they got the job it seems like they are more interested in programming than me right? It also shows perseverance and such. Guh.

People around me are talking about their jobs, their side projects and all that. They go to a lot of hackathons and maybe some events too. Most don't really care about grades, as long as they pass that's fine.

But me, I care about grades, because I am thinking of taking a masters. I stopped going to hackathons because I either feel like I am too busy or too incompetent to go. Sideprojects, I've tried, but they mostly happen during times when I don't have a lot of school work so that's not very often.

Every day I am scared that I am not doing enough. That I just suck and will always suck. Part of it is my own problem, I am shy and meeting new people and keeping up conversations isn't the easiest thing for me. It feels like my own personality is stopping me from doing the things so many of my classmates are doing. Changing ones personality is hard concious effort though, and it's difficult to know where to start.

For what little I can do now is to keep trying, trying to learn more software development, looking for a job, trying to ignore what other people are doing and instead focus on bettering myself. I am not sure I will succeed though, because people are all around me. With every success they share the more of a failure I feel like.