[jiggy2011]

Sounds like there is an incredibly strong hacker culture there.

Is working on personal projects outside class considered the norm?

It certainly wasn't when I was at uni, not with CS students anyway. After studying most CS students spent their time playing video games, watching movies, smoking pot or doing other activities.

Making a door with face detection or similar would be very unusual.

[snikolov]

In reality, everybody's very busy, but enough people find time to hack on things that it's very frequently an inspiration to hear/see what people are doing.

Most people seem to be just surviving. But there a decent amount of people who hack on things frequently, and a small, but still sizable number of very prolific hackers. There are some people that comfortably take 8 or more classes a semester. Certainly some of those types of people choose to take a normal course load and have a lot of time to hack. But it seems like the more common situtation is that you end up neglecting your schoolwork and getting poor grades.

[jiggy2011]

Yes, I found when I was at university that it was very difficult to take on a personal project and still be motivated to do my school work.

I would start hacking on something and not notice the time going by, so I would end up having to do assignments the day before. This was easy to begin with since the course starts easy but after a while becomes impossible.

The only way I can see it being possible would either be to have super high intelligence and productivity or military level discipline.

That's why I am amazed to hear of people who start whole companies whilst still getting top grades.

[strawbucks]

The culture varies across campus regarding those kinds of in-house projects. It is very common for people to have either an internship or research position outside of class, though.

[rocha]

Sounds like there is an incredibly strong hacker culture there.

Some would say that the connotation of the word hacker used here originated in the 60s at MIT.