It’s worth the wait to graduate

By Amara Janssens
Illustration By Eleanor Qu

Gone are the days when getting a bachelors degree guaranteed you a job following graduation. Instead, the value of a degree is to simply provide the checkmark to the “has degree” box on an employer’s checklist. Due to the saturation of people who fulfill that requirement, employers’ checklists have become longer than ever before.

So how do you stand out when you are one of the million Canadians who have the same education level as you do? What can you do to prevent or limit the time you will spend interning for free once you leave university? The answer begins before you graduate, by partaking in the underused co-op program available to you as a student at SFU.

I hear a lot of excuses from fellow students as to why they don’t partake in co-op, such as “I don’t want to extend my degree,” “There’s too many hoops to jump to get in,” and “I don’t know what career I want.”
Undeniably, if you fully partake in the co-op program you will be at SFU for a little bit longer than four years. I have completed three co-op terms now, and plan on doing one more, making my total degree length five years.

However, you have to think of the time that will otherwise be spent looking for that first unpaid internship when you graduate with no relevant experience. After completing co-op you will already have over a year of experience in your field, making it easier to quickly secure a job that pays better than those of your peers.

Fifty-four per cent of co-op students who have completed four or more work terms secure a job before graduation.
Additionally, co-op alumni statistics look promising, as 96 per cent of co-op alumni who did not secure a job before graduation found relevant employment within one year of graduation.

The process to get into co-op does require a few steps. First, you have to submit an application well in advance of when you want to work. If you want to do a summer co-op, you’ll have to get your application rolling in the fall semester.

During that time, you need to attend info sessions, two online workshops, a resume and cover letter writing workshop, and oneon-one meetings with your co-op advisor. Although these seem like a lot of hoops to jump, the process is not that time consuming, and you only need to do most of these things once.

Just because you are a communication co-op student or a science co-op student, you don’t need to apply for jobs only in your major. You can apply for any job, posted for any faculty.

Even though you may not know what you want to do, you are not limited from trying new things. After all, what better way to find out if you like a career than by testing it out?

If you take a co-op term, you have to get paid (a contrast to the huge illegal industry of unpaid interns), and you gain relevant experience ranging from three months to over a year, depending on how many terms you complete. According to SFU Co-op, the more work terms completed, the less time looking for jobs after graduation.

So get out there, and get some experience for your Linkedin account.