FWIW, "regular" engineering courses aren't that great at teaching the skill of engineering either. You learn tons of theory, but little that is actually practic

FWIW, "regular" engineering courses aren't that great at teaching the skill of engineering either. You learn tons of theory, but little that is actually practical (outside of labs and capstone projects). Traditionally graduates learn actual engineering on the job by being given simple projects and asking for help when they get stuck. Better companies will have a standardized way of doing this, but I haven't seen a lot of variation on this theme. In fact, come to think of it, that's pretty much what I did with the intern I had last summer. "Here's a task in Jira to add this feature. This is the area of the code you'll need to understand in order to do it. Contact me if you need help or let me know when you're done and I'll review it." He did very well!