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Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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).

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.

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