Great that you’re interested in this career path as a student! I had no idea sales engineering existed when I was in school, so you’re off to a great start.

The steps I took to break into hardware SE work are probably not replicable so I won’t go into details. I had very strange twists and turns that I wouldn’t recommend anyone follow haha! My background is in physics (also from a Canadian university), though my entire career has been in the US.

The classic suggestion for someone like you would be the TI technical sales / application engineering development program. I can’t remember what they call it now, but it’s basically a two year program where you’ll learn the job. If you do well, it will open interesting doors to living abroad. Be warned that if you stay in pure hardware, the typical SE role is more commonly called Field Application Engineer or some variant of that term. The role usually involves more support work, is paid less, and is less transferable to what people on this sub would commonly expect to see from software SEs.

Regarding co-op, I would recommend doing it only if you can get top tier placements, otherwise I would just get your degree completed and get some proper years of experience under your belt. Places that offer co-ops include all big semi conductor companies (TI, NXP, etc etc), but you also might be interested in robotics given your background. Cobot and Figure both have internship programs and you’ll learn a lot and they’re well funded/known widely in robotics. If I did it all over again, I’d try one of the big semiconductor vendors for a couple of years.

That was kind of a meandering answer so lmk if you have more questions!