A Student Perspective on Cornell's Engineering Co-op Program

The Co-op Program offers the opportunity to integrate your academic experience with the world of work and still graduate in four years!

Every year more than eighty employers recruit Cornell Engineering Co-op students.  The employers range from small startups to established conglomerates to government agencies.

Students who have experienced the Engineering Co-op Program say it's an opportunity for:

• Interviewing experience
• Hands-on engineering experience
• A reality check, adding practical problem-solving to textbook knowledge
• Working with colleagues in a professional setting and being treated as a full-time employee
• Testing interests and goals
• Gaining insight into the relevance of theoretical learning
• Seeing first-hand whether a particular field is a good match
• Sharpening analytical skills
• Earning money & paying off loans 
• Living independently; experiencing life in a new part of the country
• Spending a summer on campus, when "Ithaca is GORGES" 
• And perhaps winding up with the perfect full-time job after graduation!

What Students Say About Co-op

"One of the reasons I decided to come to Cornell was that you could co-op and still finish in four years. At Parsons Brinckerhoff, I’d get jobs that weren’t conventional engineering jobs—things that came up that no one had been trained for. I was just as good at doing these jobs as anyone else. I interpreted the results of field inspections, seeing the effects of phenomena that hadn’t been studied much. I went to Rhode Island to inspect a bridge for corrosion, working with a fiber-optic camera that could feed images from inside a 45-foot tube. And I worked on another bridge that’s used for an annual marathon—the Department of Transportation wanted to make sure the bridge could stand the particular stresses caused by 14,000 people running a race. My company needed creative approaches, so it didn’t matter if you had a lot of experience in structural engineering."
Ellen Robinson, Civil Engineering ’04, Parsons, Brinkerhoff, Quade & Douglas

"I’ve always been interested in applying what I’ve learned in school to a work setting, to take on real-world responsibility and do something that has a real impact. At UPS, I worked in the industrial engineering department doing contingency planning—in our sort operation, when something goes wrong we have to change our master operating plan, shifting people and machines around, operating on different time slots. Contingency was the first part. The second part was to do audit time studies: investigative industrial engineering. I’m on the floor with my notebook, writing down everything—it helps in formulating my own ideas and understanding the operations."
Jesse Yu, Operations Research and Engineering ’04, United Parcel Service

"The co-op experience has been like none other.  Through the entire process—from interview skills workshops and networking at career fairs, to the on-campus interviews and the actual job assignment—my suitcase of career skills and work experience is packed and ready to go!"
Narisa Ratana, Operations Research '03, United Parcel Service