Question: Most of my C++ programming experience has been projects for school. In that way, our usage of external libraries (ie boost) has been either prohibited or discouraged. Therefore we could not use smart pointers unless we wanted to write our own, which was usually beyond the scope of the projects. I'm just wondering in real world projects, how much memory management is actually done manually?

I guess this is sort of a vague question. I'm just wondering how memory management is usually done in real world projects.

Answer: 
On legacy code there's usually a lot of manual memory management. If someone hadn't take the time to refactor it you can find a lot of naked news and deletes, just happily waiting to leak somewhere.

I believe most recent, well written, software in C++ usually do use smart pointers, RAII, and so on. Manual memory management is error prone.
It is also worth mentioning that shared\_ptr made it into the standard library in 2003 as std::tr1::shared\_ptr. Or at least, if it isn't officially in the library, it is shipping with all the C++ compilers I've used recently.