I found this to be very much the case. In hindsight I'm also shocked that source control systems didn't get a mention in my course.

As a professional programmer very little of your job involves actually writing code. Most of it revolves around understanding the surrounding code well enough to not fuck it up, documenting shit and quite a lot of testing.

The few times when I had a blank slate to work with felt wonderful: I could write code almost as fast as I could think rather than analysing things for an hour then writing a couple of lines to deal with a bug or to add a feature.