Waterloo University has the biggest coop(internship) program in the world, and it has had the program since the university's inception in 1957, and the program

Waterloo University has the biggest coop(internship) program in the world, and it has had the program since the university's inception in 1957, and the program is required for all their Engineering students and optional for the other faculties. In Engineering, all students alternate between school and co-op usually every semester, so the length of the whole degree gets extended to 5 years, with 3 full years worth of studies, and 2 full years worth of experience. The way it works is that the co-op department, CECS, has an internal job posting website, where students view jobs, and submit their resumes and maybe cover letters. The employers will then look at the resumes and decide on the students they want to interview. Most interviews happen in interview rooms in the CECS building. If the employer cannot attend, then Skype or phone interviews are arranged instead. After the interviews, both the students and the employers rate each other 1 through 9, and the students get automatically paired with the job where the sum of the ratings is the lowest. CECS constantly contacts companies to get them interested in hiring uWaterloo students. Companies that currently hire uWaterloo students include FB, Google, MSFT, Apple, all the big banks in US and Canada, Qualcomm, RIM, and tons of other medium and small companies including Allerta, which HN has been hearing about quite a bit, and which is currently employing me. In terms of job locations most jobs are in North America, however there are quite a few in Japan, Germany, NZ, Australia, UK, and students can set up their own jobs if they don't like what's offered through CECS. Now about salaries, even for a first work term engineering student the range is $12-$22.50 with an average of $15.94. CECS requires that employers pay the students. Until now however there were few exceptions: start-ups were able to discuss with CECS to see if they could offer unpaid internships, however that's now being phased out. If the company can't pay the students with money, it is now required to pay them through other means such as equity. The latest Earnings Information for uWaterloo can be found here: http://www.cecs.uwaterloo.ca/pdfs/Hourly_Salary_Information_2010.pdf http://www.cecs.uwaterloo.ca/pdfs/Hourly_Salary_Information_... On another note, I think having all these internships spread out, is better for us, students, since it allows us to try out different type of jobs. Once semester you can work for a start-up, while the next one you can work for a big corporate. EDIT: Even humanities students get paid however relatively less than say, Engineering.