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Comment by surfmike | Hacker News Reader

Even for people who go to college, more work experience is a huge plus. Waterloo's coop system (4 months of school, 4 months of internship, repeated) provides a great mix of practical experience and academics. It would be great if all majors could have an experience like that.

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I've heard great things about Waterloo's program. Just wanted to give a shout out to Northeastern for its coop system as well. I've learned tons of things on the job that I never would have come across in the classroom. Also, almost every student in every major participates in the program!

Rochester Institute of Technology has a similar program - Co-op experience. All students are required to complete a specific # of semester work experience before obtaining a degree.

I've heard often from employers that they love hiring RIT graduates because of this.

It was somewhat unbelievable how much my jobs working at Gamestop and Walmart helped in college when so many people around me had never worked a job in their life. Time to rethink minimum wage?

I graduated from college 30 years ago and every engineering major at every state university I ever heard of had a coop program.

Waterloo places much more emphasis on it. The program is built around every student doing coops.

That part I did not know, most of our professors in our first year engineering classes strongly recommended it, though. I co-oped at a company only about 100 miles from my university, though other students were from out of state schools.

The other thing I just thought of was I co-oped at IBM for three semesters which was the max for a location but they had openings in a different country, I probably should have done that instead of staying in the USA for my last co-op, are most of the Waterloo students going to Canadian companies?

A lot go to SF bay area. I met a large group of them in 2007 when I was doing my coop. My school, University of the Pacific, also had a mandatory coop program, although they started to make it optional sometime after 2009.

Not all CS grads come from engineering colleges or departments. A lot liberal arts colleges have CS programs and a lot of CS programs are part of the math/"arts and sciences" department. In that case, the college may not require co-op.

Yes and it would be great if they were extended to non-engineering majors. Also even in engineering co-ops are far from universal; at my university, not everyone did a co-op and many did only one. There would be a lot of value in people doing multiple co-ops (even 4 or more like Waterloo).

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