STEARNS CENTER
STORIES
THE CHALLENGES AND ACHIEVEMENTS
OF COOPERATIVE EDUCATION
By Bill Kirtz
Telemarketing or heart transplants? Testing water
or rehabbing burn victims?
Challenging co-op jobs abound-as do mind-numbing
CVS counter stints. Chances of getting a good one depend on your major,
your adviser, your initiative. And perhaps luck.
Samantha Chaikin, an English major who graduated
in 1996, voices a frequent liberal-arts student complaint that co-ops are
"only for people studying to be something with an exact title. Others
fall through the cracks."
Now in San Francisco doing marketing and design
for Joe Boxer clothing, Chaikin feels "no one was thinking outside
the box" about innovative placements. "English majors are generally
creative, but there were no employment opportunities in any creative fields.
How about at a magazine, journal, or publishing house?"
But Janette Danowksi, another '96 grad, enjoyed
her pharmacy co-ops so much that she's hired a current student to work
alongside her in Scituate. While at Northeastern, Danowski, a single parent,
logged twenty-hour days. To her, they were worth it. Observing transplants
and clinical trials at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute was "extremely
educational," she says. "I saw things from the human point of
view, not just the pharmaceutical. I understood what I was really in college
for."
Veronica Dornan, a 1995 biology graduate, took
the initiative and found her own jobs, often a year in advance. Mentored
by biology professor Gwilym Jones, she worked with vertebrates and is now
a researcher at Harvard's School of Public Health. She calls her experience
in Jones's Center for Vertebrate Studies "great" because it shaped
her research and analytical skills.
Holly Ouellette echoes other physical therapy
juniors' opinions, that varied co-ops have let her "practice everything
you learn in class." She says working at Spaulding Rehabilitation
Hospital and Shriners Burns Hospital gives her invaluable patient contact
and the experience of getting along with the rest of the medical team.
In co-op's Stearns Center stronghold, where coordinators
adorn their maze of tiny offices with photos and plaques, diplomas and
diaries, students both rave and rant about their placements. Generalizations
are impossible. The same coordinators some students blast for indifference
and incompetence win their classmates' praise for support and creativity.
"She's incompetent!" "She's great!" Are they both talking
about the same person? Yep.
Two bright-eyed middlers, raving about their Disney
World experience and the $14.75-an-hour chance to examine M&M ingredients
for bacterial content, run into classmates disgruntled with their offerings.
One's fed up with water-testing gigs; another points to a $9,000 six-month
stint at a South Carolina cardiothoracic system.
Innovative, creative, and caring. Cynical, burned-out,
and time-serving. Co-op has had its share of the good, the bad, and the
ugly-what field doesn't?-but has moved to hire coordinators attuned to
new trends, such as developing the health-care job base in the face of
hospital staff cutbacks.
Some, like physical therapy's Rosemarie DiMarco,
have always been there for the students. The twenty-two-year N.U. veteran
builds trust with chocolate chip cookies, confidence by asking students
to reflect on what each co-op taught them about themselves as well as about
their profession. "Every year, they give a different answer to the
same question," she says. "They may not learn a lot about the
clinical side, but lots of learning comes outside the profession-interpersonal
relations, handling stress, punctuality, taking on added responsibilities,
willingness to learn. You're hired because of your skills. You're fired
because of your behavior."
The best coordinators match the job to the student.
The lazy ones do it the other way around. DiMarco defines her role as "helping
students somehow, some way get to where they're going."
Sometimes, N.U.'s "tenurocracy" impedes
that journey. DiMarco notes that co-op hardly gets universal respect on
Huntington Avenue. "While professors used to come here because of
co-op, many now come despite it," she says. Some academics here resent
co-op staffers sporting "professor" titles; co-op hasn't hired
anyone at that rank in over a decade.
Gwilym Jones couldn't care less about titles.
He sees professors, co-op advisers, and everybody else on campus doing
the same essential job: "putting out the best student we can."
An unabashed co-op fan, Jones happily arranges
co-op and professional placements. His three children all flourished on
co-op assignments in criminal justice, communications, and biology, but
he says all the students for whom he's tapped professional and academic
contacts are "family" to him.
Even in the best of families, however, co-op slots
aren't always ideal, or available. Students sometimes blame coordinators
for not getting them nonexistent jobs. Consider the "i" word:
internships, a.k.a. nonpaid labor. Co-ops at the Atlantic Monthly, Sotheby's,
CBS? Not hardly. Well-heeled volunteers snap up those prestige slots for
credentials, contacts, and occasionally college credits.
Work for free? It seems to violate the N.U. co-op
ethic. For years, for example, Huskies have ignored opportunities at the
Museum of Fine Arts's film program, one of the country's best. In their
place, interns from Swarthmore and Dartmouth have gotten valuable cinema
and public relations experience.
There's also the question of how much each student
brings to the co-op party. A classroom slug might bemoan being condemned
to menial tasks. His coordinator, knowing the importance of maintaining
credibility with employers, fears recommending him for any task more complicated
than asking, "Do you want large fries with that?"
To be sure, many indifferent scholars flourish
in the workplace. The most dedicated academic can't provide the challenge
and opportunity of a professional atmosphere and a paycheck. One coordinator
believes the people who profit most from co-op "start as drones. They're
the ones about whom we say, 'Trust me,' to employers."
Occasionally, trust is misplaced. Physical therapy
co-op coordinator Mary Jane Grusemeyer recalls a young woman who reported
to a New England Medical Center placement in hot pants and a tube top.
She then told her supervisor she'd be working a little erratically because
her boyfriend was going off to prison.
But Grusemeyer, a bubbly 1996 Bouvé College
master's degree holder whose students praise her 'round-the-clock encouragement,
reports many more success stories than mishaps. One of her many examples:
a sophomore who revived a woman in cardiac arrest, who took on a double
shift at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, who "wormed his way
in" and is now a nursing assistant.
Some at Northeastern see co-op as a narrow, careeristic
treadmill, giving students little room for the change and growth they're
supposed to undergo during their bright college years.
Nancy Waggner happily dispels that notion. The
1978 criminal justice graduate, in her fifth year of helping place CJ students,
delights in seeing them switch goals as they proceed through co-op placements.
Waggner finds a growing number of students interested
in the social services aspect of criminal justice, such as working with
delinquents, probationers, ex-offenders, and children at risk. She's also
developing placements in the growing field of dispute resolution; despite
her own JD degree and legal service at the old Charles Street Jail ("You
nail 'em, we bail 'em"), she thinks nonlawyers may be better at helping
adversaries get to "yes."
One CJ co-oper had a "mutual love affair"
with the Bright Horizons shelter for homeless children. When he returned
to school, Waggner says, "kids were begging him not to go and he was
near tears." Initially set on becoming a police officer, he now wants
to be an inner-city high school teacher.
Waggner delights in seeing a co-op placement develop
into what she calls an "N.U. mafia." It happened at Lowell's
Pathfinder Shelter for the homeless and mentally retarded. After years
of nurturing contacts there, Waggner sees four to six of our grads and
co-op students at any given time helping Pathfinder clients with veterans'
benefits, court appearances, housing, and job problems.
Of course, not everyone does as well. Waggner
says one student repeatedly blew her cover on an undercover investigation
because she was "incapable of deceit." Her next job was at a
law office, where her employer's complaints about her lack of work ethic
drew the response, "He's mean!" "End of story," says
Waggner.
Echoing the feelings of generations of staffers,
faculty, and employers impressed by Husky grit and pluck, Waggner says,
"We get students who would succeed in a parking lot. It's our great
honor that we get to stamp 'N.U.' on their foreheads."
Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the
School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the
Gown."
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