I wouldn't suggest diving into contracting straight away then, if you can find a good perm job with a great team to learn from and mentor you would reap dividends in your future career. Then with a couple of years under your belt you'll be able to pick and work with much better clients and command better rates.

It's tempting to see the contracting rates and just think of the $$ but a lot of the time it'll be cleaning up awful codebases.