Most of my university colleagues has this craze of following various professional education courses and certifications. They call it CIMA, BIT, BCS, ACS, SCJP, CCNA, MSDN, PMP and the list goes on. I don't get the rationale behind this, What's the benefit of having all these qualifications? What exactly you gain by spending such hefty amounts of money for these courses? Is it because you think you could decorate your CVs with all these bullshit? Or is it just for the sheer pleasure of seeing random Latin characters printed after your name?
As I know most of these courses focus on single line of technology or certain set of standards, which has no guarantee to be relevant in another 2 years time. Also, comparing with the academic education these courses doesn't offer much diversity and depth either. You could easily get through these exams by parroting the mock question bank and puke it all at the exam. There is very little chance of anything retaining and absorbing to yourself.
The reality is those qualifications or the grades itself won't make you brilliant. Those will just take you far away from the reality. It will give you and world that you are a qualified professional. But in reality, most of these people struggles to get things done and fails miserably at the real targets. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergy Brin and Larry Page they all have one thing common. All of them had to dropout from their academic careers, to reach their destiny. That doesn't mean you need to dropout to make a difference. However, what is evident is that the stuff you do, the challenges you meet, the problems you solve and the experiences you gain during your academic career, are what makes you different from the rest of the stack.
Inspire yourself to gain some real life opportunities. Oragnize a Gig, Do a research (I mean a real one- not those tomfoolery), Start contributing to an open source project or create your own startup. Find something which matches your passions and engage with it. Don't just waste your precious time and money, by blindly running after professional qualifications that won't worth a shite.