What’s blocking students from building real-world projects in college?

It's been a while since I was a student. When I was in university, I actually had one project that was then used in a real world context for at least a few years - by university students.

But most of my colleagues never did anything like that. Here are a few reasons why (and also why I didn't do more):

• Lack of experience

Making an actual useful real-life application is hard. You quickly get into things like security, device-model-specific bugs, support for users using the thing wrong, because you have no idea to do proper UX and so on.

Moving from making toy prototypes to real programs is not simple at all.

• Lack of mentoring

University teaches you stuff, but only the very broad-strokes basics. When you get your first real job you are usually in a team with some more senior people and they can help you move the university basics into a real-world context.

• Lack of funding

Most people can't afford putting hundreds or thousands of hours of work into a project without anyone paying the bills.

• Lack of time

Most people have to finance stuff like rent themselves. They are already balancing university, work and life. There's not a ton of time left for a third thing.

• Not a lack of ideas

Every programmer I know has more ideas than they will ever finish in their entire life. And every programmer has a bunch of MBA people who tell them every time they meet about their amazing app idea ("You know, an app where you can buy things, but you buy by swiping right! It's going to be the next Amazon! If you implement it, you can have 10% of the profits!").

If anything, having too many ideas leads to switching your side projects once your last side project becomes too annoying.

Kinda sad that selecting "Other" on being a studen/educator precludes you from leaving any useful comments, as a recent graduate (but technically no longer a student) I still have some strong opinions on the subject, even if my response should probably be otherwise filtered out. Oh well.

But it's what others said - creating a real-world application that could be safely exposed to the internet is something that takes years of real-world experience which most professors don't have. You can get a handle on creating pieces of the puzzle in Uni, but probably not the whole thing.

Rather than writing something from scratch it would make more sense to maintain an existing application stewarded by the university. There are some universities that work this way but even then they don't have enough projects for everyone to work on

Students generally don't have real-world problems that need solving. I think pretending they do makes a lot of assumptions about their life, hobbies, free time...

It's much much much more important to have a co-op program. Everything practical I learned in university was through my co-op work terms.

I am responsible for hiring some devs right now, and there's been a wide spectrum of competence from people who have "real projects". Especially with how prevalent AI is, people can literally just talk to an AI agent and get some kind of app/website spun up with 0 skill and effort. What I am always looking for is people who can work on a team in an existing codebase.

Idk which market you are in. In mine no one cares about your project. Most of companies don’t do innovation. Most of real life projects I saw just moves data around. When I interview people all I care about is knowledge of tech stack and what I call “analytical thinking”.

For one: your university might own anything you create while using their resources and facilities.

time

it takes quite a big bunch of time to craft anything even remotely useful - the golden era of extreme java programming has long passed

It's the real world part.
I have written a SMTP-Server in C and some crud services in java, but everything ran on localhost.
If I wanted to expose them on the web I would have to ensure the code is actually secure, ensure compliance with data protection regulations, moderate user generated content, get ssl certificates, a domain and server hosting.
Half those steps are one minor mistake away from a large bill.

Money and time.

Tons of people build cool projects during their time in university, but the vast vast majority of people don't because they are eating beans and rice and ramen and pizza and studying, not spending 500€-1000€ on iterative prototyping and the equipment to test everything.

I have bills and student loans to pay. I didn't get a job in my field right out of college so I've been stuck bouncing around min wage to make ends meet. Have very little time to do any projects.

It's a Google Docs link...