After spending hours attempting to get as many game developers in a room as possible, I managed to track down Ian Lewis from the XNA team at Microsoft, Andrew Brownsword from EA, Kent Quirk from Linden Labs which make Second Life.  I may or may not have used an Xbox 360 with Rockband primed as bait.

As usual, I asked them what a student should know.  They talked about figuring out how to solve problems, working in teams, writing good code, the coding or testing hat, and a bunch more.

While these are game developers, almost everything they mention directly translates to normal development.