[hazzen]

My observations as a (somewhat) recent graduate from UW CSE:

Many of the students that wanted to go into startups after graduation instead of a job either had started on some product during school and wanted to see that through to completion, or were of the mind that they could just work for a few years at {Amazon, Google, Microsoft, ...} and then do the risky thing.

There is also a lack of exposure in the curriculum. They are in the middle of re-designing it, but before that only one class let you create a small team, come up with a product, and build it. It was seen as a painful course (it was) and it was also taken by most everyone (including people who couldn't care less, so it was hard to find a group of 4-5 motivated people). I don't recall any hackathons when I was there aside from ACM programming competitions.

[dbalatero]

As a startup person, I had to seek out the opportunities to build a product as part of a small team each quarter at UW CSE. That said, you can do it if you have the motivation.

All the literature about the program mentions that you can optionally take 1 capstone course (which are the big project courses that let you have free creative reign over what you produce). My solution was to just do 3 capstones instead.

I ended up taking the Google/Hadoop project course, distributed systems capstone, and Dan Weld's web services capstone. Each quarter I had 3-4 people on a team, and we were able to build something awesome.

To me it always seemed like a problem of advertising the opportunity within the department, and encouraging big risky projects vs. focused, assigned classwork.

[hazzen]

Fun that I can recognize you based on your user name, but you probably can't do the same matching for me (its Mikey).

You were actually one of the people I was thinking of when I originally put in an aside about the really motivated people still doing it. I then removed that aside, but I probably should not have. The really motivated people are going to go into startups; they caught the itch at some point and need to scratch it to remain happy.

The subset of people that could go either way (startup or corporate) don't quite have the opportunity to see what a startup would be like at UW. The capstones are good, but for most they are an afterthought to be done in the final quarter or two, when they have most likely landed a job already. Software Engineering (CSE 403) is more about satisfying a requirement than about building something, and that is all most students end up with.