[sevensor]

> The goal of university is not to prepare you as best as possible for working life, but to teach academic thinking.

This is a well-worn false dichotomy. It sets up scientific understanding of a field against job skills. Scientific understanding is important because it saves you months or years of flailing around in the dark, trying to solve problems without understanding them, or worse, producing half-baked work that could be so much better if only you had a clue. But without context, it's very hard to make knowledge stick, and projects provide that context.