Career advice as a junior software developer?

Honest question, why do you need to build a profile? Doesn't the university consider your prior grades for the most part as the basis for your acceptance to masters? Or are you seeking to hone your skills in order to improve the quality of later studies?

By my observations so far, I'd say that bachelor's studies provide a formal basis to many of the aspects of programming, but in order to do so they dig out a small pond in the backyard of the virtual realm for the students. There are many fields of expertise out there, and problems are oft more complex than those presented in courses. Possibly infinitely so, as the only limit is where to compromise in what a system can achieve.
Listing some fields off: Robotics, networking, finance, artificial intelligence -> nlp / computer vision / commerce / audio manipulation / signal processing, operating systems, databases, cryptography, video games, embedded systems, web development (frontend / backend).
Now, you'll get necessary education on any subject you take, and your thesis / project will be loosely guided by a professor, but you'll likely still have to do a lot of independent theoretical reading to write it. Papers are difficult to comprehend for the uninitiated. In order to have a better understanding of a particular problem or solution, you need working knowledge of the topic or field, to understand the motivation behind it, to be in a similar mindset as an expert in the field, even without the diversity of experience and personal accomplishments.
In other words, what would be most helpful is knowing what kind of field you're interested in, and why you need a higher degree for it. For me, that took 10 years: a motivated programmer can get by quite well without formalities, but AI is a chaotic mare that rejects conventional taming. And yet it can match reality where formulaic thinking can only approximate at best.