Good for you. Some of us old-timers have lived through pure waterfall, waterfall-inspired, and guilt and shame for not doing waterfall right.
This school has its agile proponents too, though. But compared to the common practices of the penultimate decade, XP and Agile at least acknowledged that failure was the default mode of software development projects, and made contingency plans for it.
Absolutely. If the waterfall isn't working, you need to waterfall harder. Because more time spent up front writing paper architectures and guesswork requirements is what's needed!
To me it felt like they were saying, "You know all the things you did to make your last project a huge success: the short iterations, tight feedback loops, early and frequent customer involvement, designing your systems to accommodate change? Yeah, don't ever do any of that again."
So I left, and found that dogmatic by-the-book scrum shops can also be horrible places to work. Live and learn.