An engineering co-op student’s struggle to find an internship.
When I first submitted my university application to Concordia and signed up for co-op, I expected a system that would help me find internships with more efficiency and less stress. Having now completed two internships, I still find my experience as stressful as ever. When I spoke about my disappointment with co-op students from different faculties, it was frustrating to see that my experience wasn’t an isolated case, but more of a normality.
My head initially held high, from the first cover letter drafts to the final day of my internship I felt it gradually descend as I got buried in paperwork and unwanted obstacles on my path.
Creating a whole new course sequence is challenging, and the process can take weeks. You have to account for all the prerequisites, you have to make sure all the classes are taken in the correct order, and you have to reluctantly fill your summers with classes to still qualify as a full-time student.
The mandatory internship application preparation training during my first semester wasn’t much help either. I spent multiple hours a week watching a recorded lecture accompanied by exercises, which wasn’t really effective to prepare students for potential interviews. Since I was already familiar with most of the material, it felt like a waste of time.
Finding an actual internship wasn’t an easy task either. Writing dozens of cover letters and sending out CVs to 60 different places only to get back one interview is discouraging. When, a few weeks into the internship hunt, you hear of people securing their dream positions and you have only now lined up a single interview, it’s normal to get overwhelmed.
I was constantly horrified that I would be unable to find an internship and would be left stranded, postponing my work term to the next semester like many others and enlarging the candidate pool even further.
While the co-op administration pushed me to find internships and apply to more positions by letting me know when I was behind schedule in my applications, I didn’t feel like they offered much help beyond that point. My success or failure depended 100 per cent on me.
Now, with two internships under my belt, I realize that the only reason I was able to find my second internship was due to internal networking during my first one — completing two internships back to back and then returning to classes after such a significant hiatus.
While co-op did provide me with a slightly larger internship database than if I filed my applications separately and an incentive for companies to hire me, the program didn’t do much to help me secure a position.
All in all, the complications of class sequence changes and mandatory training during my first year are the memories that stick with me when I think about co-op, rather than the ones I made as an intern in an engineering department of a company.