I went through ChE at UT Austin in the 96-00 period. Most of my friends were in CS or EE (which kind of explains my actual career path) and it seems that their

I went through ChE at UT Austin in the 96-00 period. Most of my friends were in CS or EE (which kind of explains my actual career path) and it seems that their experience was much, much different than this persons. They were hacking C and Perl and the better ones were getting odd jobs in industry through their professors by the middle of their Sophomore year. They had some pretty challenging real world like projects to do (way more than I ever got a chance to work on so early, that is for certain) from identifying a problem, choosing the infrastructure that would be most conducive to solving the problem before the deadline, coding the solution and finally, testing the crud out of other people's projects... Finally, at the first opportunity, a bunch of us broke off and started a company and so on etc. etc. It is easy to blame culture and professors or other people in authority but ultimately the bulk of the community, in this case, are students. It is ridiculously easy to start a student organization. If I remember correctly, UT will even grant $700 or so to get started so there is little excuse not to generate interest and involvement. Then again, maybe it is better to just go hack and meet like minded students... As a side note, I think it is a terrible idea to get business students involved in any attempt at a startup. They add very little and tend to want to take over in my experience.