In fact, given the highly competitive nature of the job market, I'd
suggest that someone who hasn't found the motivation to learn those two
languages on their own (college classes or not) by the time they finish
college is definitely facing an uphill battle in securing and keeping a
job as a game programer.  The market is small enough that companies can
afford to hire those few individuals who live and breath that kind of
stuff... the kind of person for whom the first two years of college
programming courses were NOT how they learned programming, but were
rather an annoyance they had to endure in order to do interesting stuff.

Another suggestion for the OP: in addition to straight computer graphics
-- which I agree is probably the most important thing to learn -- you'll
want some broader exposure.  Get and read a good book on computational
geometry, for example.  Also, subscribe to the ACM digital library and
spend your free time reading whatever seems like it may be relevant to
computer games.  That may include AI, graphics, networking, and just
random stuff.  Back when I was in college and programming mainly for
fun, I managed to make use of an algorithm for identifying clusters of
data points in a statistical set, and so reduced CPU load and network
usage dramatically for a peer-to-peer multiplayer game I was working on
with some friends.  If I hadn't been reading journal articles for a
different purpose, I'd never have thought of it.  You want to be the
sort of person who thinks of stuff like that.

Don't just learn this stuff by reading, either.  You're trying to get
into the ultimate practical applications field, in which the ONLY thing
that matters is whether your code appears to work well.  It doesn't
matter if your AI implementation uses a great algorithm or not, as long
as the game is fun.  You need to develop a good sense of when "AI"
should be implemented as a set of ad hoc heuristics instead of trying to
do things right, and you'll need to be surprisingly good at coming up
with effective heuristics.  Stuff like the AT-Robots game is a fun way
of developing this sort of skill.

Then again, I'm not a game programmer... nor have I ever been.  I'm
guessing from non-professional experience at the kind of thing that
would help a game programmer to be successful.