all tech work will ultimately crush your soul ...

On the qa side:
I'm not in QA, but I build tools for them, so this is all some sort of BS ...
finish your degree, a lot of place won't even consider you without one, unless
you can point to some amazing piece of work. The alternative is going in as a manual tester (and the bone crushing boredom that goes with that ), and then hope you can move up .

QA people are a strange breed, you need a mentality that enjoys breaking things,
tends to understanding the big picture (how does this thing I'm testing
fit into the picture, how would a customer use it)

Be familiar with a scripting language: Perl/Python/TCL, The better you are
with this, the more valuable you will be.

You need to understand the software development cycle, practical experience
in this area is much preferred to the theoretical (play around with an open source project to get that experience)

Understand how a bug tracking system works - look at bugzilla.

Basic system admin skills will take you a long way, chosse your favourite
platform and understand everything about it.

Understand a unit test framework, perl has one built in, Junit, CPPunit are out
there too.