I thought of this 7 years ago and I still think it rings true. In my experience, school projects were tightly scoped and had things like a basic build system and boilerplate runnable code (e.g. main) already provided. Maybe even some tests. It trains a specific muscle in a certain way.

With personal projects, you do all of this yourself and incidentally also train the equivalent “stabilizer” muscles. Things like: making the repo, writing the main and boilerplate code, setting up unit tests, setting up CI, setting up dependencies and their management.

And in my experience, it’s all these “stabilizer” activities that define what it means to be a senior engineer. Junior engineers work within an existing project; senior engineers own the entire thing, including these “little” (critical) parts.

The point here isn’t to necessarily criticize CS education; there are good, practical reasons for setting up such project structure to ensure all students have a good experience, given the time constraints. The point is that students should be wary of not doing any personal projects at all throughout a CS education. Maybe it would be possible so students don’t have to do this in their free time, and build it into some kind of flexible course. I suppose this is the point of final capstone projects, but I think senior year is far too late to be doing this for the first time.