Cooperative education is Northeastern’s distinctive, competitive advantage—and has been for more than a century. It enables us to take on the most pressing challenges of our time with a spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship unmatched by other universities. It is one of the reasons that so many Northeastern graduates are in positions of leadership around the world.
Ask any of our alumni what prepared them for success, and they cite the experiences they had on co-op. We weren’t just taught leadership, they say—we lived it. The valuable insight our students gain in the workplace has spurred thousands of our alumni—including the engineers featured in these pages—to take on challenges, embrace risk, and develop new solutions to old problems. Even those who did not participate in co-op speak of the spirit of entrepreneurship that permeates Northeastern.
This spirit continues on our campus today. Last fall, Dominic Coryell, a senior finance/accounting major, was named a winner of the 2008 Global Student Entrepreneur Awards by the national Entrepreneurs’ Organization. While a student at Northeastern, Dominic transformed the campus dry-cleaning service known as Husky Express into Garment Valet, a high-tech laundry and dry-cleaning service that provides next-day delivery and pickup around Boston. He is now expanding the business across the country.
Northeastern’s solutions-driven ethos has powered more than accomplished careers; it is the driving force behind our success as a leading research university. We were among the first universities in the nation to establish an integrated model of basic and applied research—a model that has become the standard by which great research universities today are measured. At the heart of that approach is the same “think and do” philosophy behind experiential learning—the idea that knowledge discovery should be connected to the larger world.
Just look at some of the recognition Northeastern has recently received for its high-impact research. The Barnett Institute’s newest interdisciplinary venture, the Center for Advanced Regulatory Analysis, also described in these pages, is one example. Inspired by a mission to leverage the institute’s expertise in several areas of fundamental and applied science to ensure drug quality, longtime benefactor Louis Barnett, B’44, H’77, and his wife, Madlyn, decided to help fund the launch of the center.
Four recent federal grants—two investigating matters of homeland security and two to promote leadership among women in engineering—further illustrate Northeastern’s position as a leading research university that creates knowledge for the benefit of society.
Today our goal is to take co-op, experiential learning, and translational research to the next level. This will mean continuing to expand our co-op and experiential offerings in business, research, the arts, and service beyond the eighty-eight cities outside the United States where they currently exist. It also means pursuing new interdisciplinary research partnerships that span international borders and leverage our leadership in emerging fields such as nanotechnology, drug discovery, and homeland security.
In achieving these goals, we will bring Northeastern’s trademark strengths to the task: a time-tested ability to embrace innovation and develop solutions where they are needed. By doing so, we will reaffirm Northeastern’s reputation as one of this century’s preeminent experiential research universities.
Sincerely,
Joseph Aoun
President, Northeastern University