Yeah man it really do be like that. When I was in school I got an internship at a place that made some specialized software. There was a lot of domain specific knowledge that I was missing, and our system had many components and services that were initially overwhelming. Over time I got it, and now I'm there full time. I found that it helps to take work that you don't have any idea how to do, because then you're forced to learn how to do it. In some cases you can even gain some "lost" knowledge and become more valuable at the company (by "lost" knowledge I mean knowledge about a system or a thing that was built by people who have long since left and taken the knowledge with them, or knowledge about a critical part of the software pipeline that your team doesn't really know much about because it's someone else's job... etc.). Then you become the guy who people go to with questions, the guy who fixes stuff when it breaks, etc.
