Nissan VVEL Explained

Ventruck

yeah, and he was dead-on in saying that.

At least in the US, in non-private institutions, it seems like the standard curriculum in universities really don't do much of anything apart from try to set you up conceptually. And being conceptual, you're not going to remember everything because at some point it sounds trivial until because you really don't know what direction you plan to go with it. The project itself would be a concentrated discipline, and unless you were given enough time, you're not actually applying a good share of what you learned the years before. In fact I mainly applied on-the-fly Solidworks + ProE knowledge because I couldn't take an FEA class until senior year as an elective. Virtually no thermo/electrical/higher levels of Math in our curriculum/fluid dynamics/materials was relevant or applied.

I had a classmate who was an exchange student from Europe. He was totally struck by how we're glued to a book when he was working hands-on with go-carts the year before in his country. Technically, we do have Formula SAE in the US, but that's a supplementary club vs integrated into curriculum, and depending where you are there's going to be some snobbery that dictates/reduces your role in the project.

tl;dr, if you're an engineering student you'll likely have to go the extra mile and land some internships for any proper experience before going into the professional world. It was a PITA for me to land a job and I'm not even doing anything close to what I hope I would.