Cooperative education at Drexel enables undergraduate students to balance classroom theory with practical, hands-on experience prior to graduation. Students alternate classes with full-time employment through University-approved employers. Generally, students are on co-op for a six-month period, alternating with six months of classroom study. Cooperative education at Drexel is a degree requirement for most majors.
Drexel has responded to the burgeoning global market by providing students with the opportunity to gain international exposure through co-op. International co-op provides students with the experience of working in the global economy and the opportunity to develop relevant cross-cultural skills in an increasingly global society.
For more information, please visit the Steinbright Career Development Center, which is responsible for coordinating the university’s co-op program.
Boeing co-op Will Culbertson talks about his work on a wide-body Boeing jet.
Hunter Kippen worked as a member of the cloud services team at OSIsoft Software Company in Philadelphia.
DeShaye Carter, president of Drexel's National Society of Black Engineers, was a desktop support engineer at eMoney Advisor in Radnor.
For his co-op at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gabe Grajewski conducted research for the Division of Indoor Air Quality and Ventilation.
Spotlighting two College of Engineering undergraduates whose co-ops this past summer took them to South Korea for nanomaterials research.
Oluwadamilola “Dami” Bolarin is completing his second co-op cycle under the guidance of Professor Giuseppe R. Palmese in Chemical and Biological Engineering.
Alejandro Gutiérrez-Pérez completed his co-op at the College of Engineering under the guidance of Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Jonathan Spanier.
In our third installment, we introduce Molly Cuka, whose co-op with Boeing ran from September 2017 to this past March. She is still working part-time for the company.
The College of Engineering highlights the Drexel cooperative program in which students fulfill six-month internships in fields of their choosing to gain experience and to see how they like the work. This month, CoE introduces Maria Natalia Noriega Pedraza, who completed a dual-program co-op in France and in Germany.
Most people know about Drexel’s celebrated cooperative program, in which students fulfill six-month internships to see how they like the work. But what, exactly, is that work? What does a co-op student do all day? What are the tasks assigned? And what time is lunch?