This article examines how students in a multidisciplinary project-based learning course involving real customers perceive their interactions with their customers. The authors conducted a qualitative study and analysed students' learning reports by means of a thematic network analysis. The analysis shows how students perceive their status in relation to their customers and how their perceptions of their work affect how they see the value of the projects. The authors consider their empirical findings in the context of the existing literature on university-industry collaboration and thereby summarize different scenarios of the contrasting working practices and priorities in academia and industry. Based on the observed similarities between their own analysis and results reported in the literature, the authors recommend that project-based learning researchers should pay greater attention to research done on university-industry collaboration.