It’s been a guiding force at Northeastern for a century, and a worldwide game changer in higher ed. And, true to its tradition of innovation, Northeastern is marking the centennial by making cooperative education even more powerful.

By Karen Feldscher

Illustrations by Matt Laskowski

In July 2008, architecture major Laura Boyle traveled to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for a co-op at Grupo Cultural Arte Consciente, a non­profit that gets kids off the streets and into the arts.

Boyle, AS’09, who’s now studying in the Rhode Island School of Design’s master’s program in architecture, assisted in the design of a new building, created a grant-proposal book, and taught art to local public-school students.

But the most memorable part of her experience was the part she was least prepared for: She learned to mix mortar by hand and build a brick wall.

“I put down six rows a day, and, let me tell you, I am proud of that work,” she says. “When you finally build a wall, you think: That wall is mine.”

And that wall had meaning. It was a part of the program’s very first performance center. “The center started on an empty lot, and was just built up from there,” Boyle recalls. “It might not be the best-built center, but it will bring so much to these children.”

What’s most remarkable about Boyle’s co-op story is that it’s not remarkable at all. Northeastern students in every major, including the liberal arts, are increasingly pursuing co-op in far-flung corners of the globe, getting far outside their comfort zones and gaining both insight into the unknown and a passion for making a difference.

“We see the one hundredth anniversary of co-op as an opportunity to chart the next one hundred years,” says President Aoun. “In fact, it is the co-op ethos itself that compels us to look forward, to refine and expand this powerful educational model.

“Because co-op keeps us in touch with the world, we understand how the world is changing, and how we must modernize our core educational programs.”

Standout in a crowd
When the university first adopted co-op in 1909, it was one of just two co-op institutions in the world.

Today, although a growing number of universities offer co-op, and almost all universities offer other forms of experiential learning, Northeastern is the world leader in cooperative education.

The university has been honing its co-op know-how for the past century. In the process, it has developed a depth of connection to the world that enables the university to innovate co-op in ways that keep it responsive to changing student needs. But university officials say Northeastern’s advantage is even more fundamental than that.

“Co-op and international experiences are our core,” says Aoun. “Co-op is not an extracurricular activity for us—it builds our curriculum.”

Part of what makes co-op powerful at Northeastern is the way students are prodded to understand how their real-world experiences connect to their classroom studies, and vice versa.

“Some universities do co-op on the margins,” says provost Stephen Director. “We’re doing it smack in the middle of our business. We know how to do it well.”

Unlike most universities, Northeastern also offers students the benefits of strong long-standing relationships with more than 2,400 employers around the world.

Ketty Rosenfeld, director of international cooperative-education programs, says Northeastern’s expertise in facilitating all kinds of student experiences—domestic and international co-ops, study abroad, and internships—is unparalleled.

“Our students can take a class in Geneva, Switzerland; stay there to do a co-op; move on to study abroad in another country; then do another co-op somewhere else,” says Rosenfeld. “We have the resources and the expertise to make this happen.”

Senior Ximena Tovar’s curriculum vitae offers a particularly wide-ranging example—a tricontinental one, in fact.

This international-affairs major, a native of Peru, has taken Chinese-language and business courses at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. She also completed a co-op in Costa Rica at a nonprofit that promotes public-private partnerships for sustainable development.

The global sweep of her college experiences suited Tovar to a T. “I’ve always wanted to work in the area of diplomacy,” she says. “That’s always at the back of my mind, an idea that I could work for the United Nations someday.”

The real added value
Ask any cash-strapped student who’s gratefully pocketed a co-op paycheck over the past hundred years: Co-op salaries have always been appreciated.

Yet the educational value that co-op provides is even more prized by students and alumni. Northeastern spends a lot of time getting the classroom–real world connection just right, for maximum learning.

“Over the years,” says Susan Powers-Lee, vice provost for undergraduate and cooperative education, “we’ve been able to select the best co-ops that give the best experience, matched to what you’re learning in the classroom.”

Political-science professor William F. S. Miles says he appreciates the freedom the university gives him to create partnerships with communities in the developing world. He’s seen the dramatic impact these partnerships have on his students.

This year, Miles’s undergraduate students raised money to improve hygienic conditions in a Nigerian village. Engagement like this, says Miles, “makes book knowledge real and relevant. And it empowers students. It gives them the feeling they can actually change difficult conditions that, otherwise, they would only be learning about.”

Bruce Ronkin, interim dean of arts and sciences and a professor of music, says he often sees co-op reveal its true power in the classroom after his music-industry students come back from jobs at music-management or music-software firms, or record companies.

“I might bring up an issue related to an artist’s recording contract,” he says, “and it’s no longer theoretical, because a student who worked at Sony Music dealt with that exact issue, and could say how it was resolved.

“At that point,” Ronkin continues, “it’s no longer just the instructor sharing experiences. You now have twenty students with their own experiences, each teaching the others. And when the students go out for their next co-op, they’ve experienced this tremendous burst of intellectual and professional growth. It’s a very powerful educational model.”

Powers-Lee says Northeastern will create richer and richer learning environments for students by continuing to harness all the latest technological innovations.

“Co-op has been successful for a hundred years because it has always leveraged the best of the workplace,” she says. “We have really pushed to make sure our students have opportunities that are at the leading edge of the world of work.

“In the last few decades, that leading edge has been defined by technology,” she continues. “Going into the next hundred years, co-op will continue doing its leveraging, and will keep students working at the forefront of technology.”

Then there’s another “value-added” consideration Northeastern devotes a lot of energy to: The co-op employer has to be well-served.

Employers “count on us,” says Director. “They view our co-op students as real employees, not as students just getting a little bit of experience. If these co-op students were taken away, employers would have a hard time.”

Director says Northeastern is determined to find ever-better ways of quantifying how much students learn on co-op, what impact co-op has on them, and how satisfied employers are with the program.

“We take assessment seriously,” he says.

Co-op makes the world go ‘round
As globalization transforms more of the world’s activities, the university is moving to ensure that co-ops in businesses along the Champs Élysées and Las Ramblas are as customary as those on Beacon Street and Madison Avenue.

The workplace benefits of global co-ops are clear. They produce employees who can excel in multicultural, multinational environments—even at a very young age.

Nicholas Hadley-Kamptz is the senior programming and content manager at Turner Broadcasting System. He hires Northeastern co-ops to serve as programming coordinators at his London office, which is staffed by an eclectic mix of Eastern Europeans, Africans, Scandinavians, Canadians, and Americans.

“They’re thrown in the deep end,” Hadley-Kamptz says of the Northeastern students. Yet each one “has brought an open mind and an adaptability. They’ve learned to multitask and deal with many different needs and requirements from a multitude of sources.”

Students are similarly enthusiastic about their international experiences. Human- services major Alexandra Budge recently came back from teaching English in Turkey. “I never really knew what was going to be expected of me on any given day,” she says of her co-op. “The place was always changing, which taught me to be adaptive.”

This fall, to ensure an increasing number of students have access to co-ops abroad, Aoun announced a new program, the Presidential Global Scholars initiative.

“Given the world they will be asked to lead after graduation, today’s students will need to be as comfortable working in Beijing or Nairobi as they would be in Boston or New York,” says Aoun.

He continues, “It is a top priority to make co-op global—to ensure that our students have the kind of broadening, transformative experiences they will need to live fulfilling lives in a global society.”

Through competitively awarded grants, up to two hundred students will become Global Scholars each year. Out of this group, a select few will earn the designation Presidential Global Fellow. Officials expect the program over the short term to double the number of Northeastern students who participate in global co-op experiences annually.

To further boost international co-op, Northeastern is actively pursuing strong relationships with key universities around the world.

The idea, says Director, is to “help facilitate their students coming on co-op here, and our students going on co-op there.”

Obviously, as more schools around the world adopt co-op, the number of international co-op employers will increase, too. And co-op students will be traveling a lot more.

Take Matilda Urie, E’09. Her parents charted her co-op travels by placing pins in a huge map that hung in their living room, following her progress as she built wind farms in Scotland, and worked at a power company in Coventry, England.

All the miles paid off. Urie accepted a post-graduation job that’s got her searching the Scottish countryside for potential wind-farm sites, gauging the quality of wind—is it constant and reliable for energy production, or just gusty—and drawing on her myriad engineering skills.

“The experience of working internationally is everything to me now,” she said not long before she left the States to start her new career. “It’s my job. It’s my passion. I can’t wait to get back to Scotland to help develop clean energy-producing turbines—it’s the right thing to do to preserve our planet.”

Knocking down boundaries
In 1909, cooperative education at Northeastern was available only to engineering students.

It’s easy to see why engineering was the first discipline to move to co-op. What’s learned in the engineering classroom quickly translates into the skills required for the engineering job.

Yet, over the past century, co-op has been warmly and thoroughly embraced by all the university’s disciplines.

“We’ve been expanding co-op options for decades,” Powers-Lee explains. “A hundred years ago, we made things. Today, we’re making knowledge. It’s a different product that requires different approaches to the workplace.”

The number of research-focused co-op jobs is especially on the rise.

In April, biochemistry major Steven Criscione, currently a senior, won a competitive Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship—offered to students who intend to pursue a career in mathematics, the natural sciences, or engineering—for his research on DNA repair and enzyme activity.

A co-op at Genzyme’s cancer immunology research group had allowed him to hone his research skills, work alongside heavy hitters in the biomedical-sciences industry, and refine his career goals, which center on drug discovery and therapeutic design.

“I hope to make a contribution to science and society by tackling difficult problems in the laboratory and providing a better understanding of disease,” Criscione says.

Chemistry chair Graham Jones places student researchers in substantive co-op positions at major corporations all around the Boston area.

Five years ago, Jones sought feedback from a dozen or so blue-chip and high-tech firms on what would make research co-ops more useful to them.

Their response: They wanted students “with real reach.” As a result, Jones decided to make chemistry labs a lot tougher.

“Labs used to be two hours long, and were designed so students would succeed,” he says. “Now they’re six hours long, and we’ve designed them not to have easy answers. In fact, sometimes they are deliberately designed so that students fail. The idea is to challenge students to overcome problems.”

In addition, Jones explains, co-op students sometimes receive targeted instruction in Northeastern research labs to prepare them for an upcoming position.

“We customize the students’ training,” Jones says. “We want them to succeed. And we want the companies to be blown away.

Such an emphasis on specialized, intellectually rigorous preparation makes sense in a knowledge-based economy. It’s another example of Northeastern’s focus on adding value to its co-op model.

Freedom of choice
This added value is grounded in another Northeastern tradition—understanding and responding to the changing needs of students.

For example, next fall the university is introducing a standard four-year degree program that includes two co-op periods. The four-year degree, which will be offered alongside the traditional five-year program, will make the benefits of co-op available to students who want greater flexibility.

This is of particular importance to students who attend Northeastern knowing they want to go on to professional or graduate school, says Powers-Lee.

Northeastern’s growing focus on undergraduate research opportunities, innovative dual-degree and interdisciplinary options, and “four-plus-one” programs that allow students to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in five years are also part of this student-centered emphasis.

Additionally, students are finding they have more freedom during the co-op selection process. Years ago, Northeastern students in need of a co-op went dutifully to their co-op advisers, got handed information about several jobs, and were told to apply to one of them.

Not so anymore. Although students still confer with their co-op advisers, they now have the opportunity to browse dozens of jobs online.

Such autonomy plays into a long-standing strength of Northeastern co-op: It brings out the entrepreneur in nineteen-year-olds.

Today’s students tend to be thorough self-starters when it comes to finding a co-op. They often seek out their own employers around the world. They negotiate their own jobs. Some co-op students are entirely entrepreneurial, and devote their co-op periods to growing companies they themselves have launched.

Junior Praful Mathur, who’s studying computer science and economics, is the cofounder of a company that’s developing software applications that enhance what a traditional walkie-talkie baby monitor can do. On an extended nine-month co-op, he was able to, in effect, work for himself.

“Northeastern really put a lot of faith in me,” Mathur says. “I wanted to explore this opportunity, and the university really encouraged me to do it.”

Clearly, the university is expanding every key aspect of co-op, a sign of what is to come. New types of jobs. New international possibilities. More ways of connecting the real world and the ivory tower.

“At Northeastern, we have known for a century what many other colleges and universities are discovering today,” says Aoun. “The world is too interesting to ignore.”

Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.