In the face of more difficult employment prospects and increasingly competitive co-ops, Northeastern University has announced a most ingenious remedy to the situation. Many students choose Northeastern because of the school’s hallmark co-op program, renowned for its ability to provide students with real “experiential learning” before graduation. In order to better reflect the kinds of jobs that students can expect post-graduation, Northeastern has collaborated with McDonalds in order to provide new co-op positions. These McCo-ops will allow our students to gain invaluable experience at a prestigious corporation, valued at approximately $200 billion as of writing.
The lucky students who are accepted into these prestigious McCo-ops will learn invaluable skills such as the operation experience of complex machines, client-facing sales operations, and constant high-pressure scenarios which cultivate high levels of critical thinking and logical reasoning. This invaluable experience allows students to eventually come out of Northeastern with a foot already in the corporate world, present within an industry valued over $21 trillion in 2025 along with the skills required to laterally transfer to other prestigious service corporations such as the Big 3 coffee: Dunkin, Starbucks, Panera.
According to Li-aan Poarly, a 2nd year at Northeastern who recently came back from the Uzbekistan location, “This McCo-Op gave me experience I could find nowhere else. The amount of mechanical skills I’ve learned along with soft-skills I’ve developed will definitely be useful for the rest of my career.”
Kevin Chen contributed reporting for this story.
