As I wrote in my first article, Welcome to Rennes, I lived in Rennes from January 2023 to June 2023 followed by a short stint at the University of Oslo. You may be wondering though: How did I manage to fit in such a long trip in the middle of college and still manage to graduate in four years?
The answer is in how Northeastern student schedules are organized. Northeastern offers a special “co-op” program designed to expose students to real-world work environments and gain practical skills through two or three “co-ops” (internships) of six to eight months each. This means that by the end of graduation, students have around 12–24 months of work experience before graduating.
The internships are integrated into your course schedule and are scheduled for the spring cycle (January to June) or the fall cycle (July to December). I was scheduled for the spring cycle. My first co-op was based in San Francisco at the company Ginger Labs, the creators of the popular note-taking app Notability, where I was an iOS developer. There, I was able to work on a number of interesting features (thanks to my amazing manager Kyle Rokita) and explore the San Francisco Bay Area.
