[leoedin]

It's the same in a lot of technical fields. In my mechanical engineering courses there was a minority who truly loved everything to do with machines. The people who work on their car at weekends or build projects in their spare time. They were truly excited just to be able to do what they loved and get paid for it.

The majority though are people who have some affinity for maths and sciences and have made a career choice to study engineering. They put in the hours to do the coursework, but if it's not proscribed in the course they simply won't do it. They go home and don't think about engineering at all. Big companies are full of these people, chugging away at their job but not particularly interested in spending their spare time honing their skills or working on other stuff because it's actually pretty awesome.