I've found writing a book, blogging, and building a Facebook group to be the most effective way to build my brand.
Of course, everyone has different strengths, so it depends on what your strengths are.
I would read Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (the CEO of Duck Duck Go). It is about different methods for gaining traction with your startup. Some of them also are effective for building your personal brand, for example, PR, unconventional PR, social, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, viral marketing, engineering as marketing, tradeshows, offline events, speaking engagements, and community building.
Unconventional PR essentially means doing publicity stunts. Ryan Holiday wrote a great book about this called Trust Me I'm Lying.
In it, I talked about how when schools embrace remote learning people will start questioning why they should pay tens of thousands of dollars for a professor teaching them online when they could just take a Udemy class, so it is interesting you said that.
Are you majoring in computer science?
Yes, many companies use degrees to quickly filter applicants. But tons of companies don't.
In my experience, once I got my first job as a software engineer without a CS degree, no one asked about it again later.
You could also consider going to an online programming boot camp like App Academy. It would be much less expensive and they have a great track record of getting their student's jobs.