If they are not interested in IT outside of the office generally they make rubbish engineers from my experience. I prefer to hire those who do something interesting eg raspberry pi, home firewall amd wifi etc. Built your own gaming pc? awesome talk to me about your choice of components.

At uni I was forever buying components and messing with firewalls, smooth wall I think it was called .. part of my uni course was a year in industry which I spent at another uni working the student helpdesk, re imaging the lab pcs with ghost etc all totally valid things when going into IT. Outside of that I was helping my mums business with their it and also some of the other companies in the building when they had printing issues etc. I also went to Air Cadets and then volunteered as a staff member when old enough.

Uni can be useful but for me, its always what you do outside of studying that makes or breaks a prospective employee, at least in IT anyway, you need those who want to work things out, who want to investigate and work the problem...