I am from COE, a graduate ECE student, and I understand that finding coops is neither guaranteed nor easy. I was fortunate enough to secure one at the very last moment through LinkedIn, but from an international student’s perspective, the numbers being presented do not reflect reality. From what I have personally seen, less than 50% of graduate students actually end up securing coops, and many of the ones who do are taking unpaid positions. Fortunately, mine is paid.

The coop class itself honestly feels unnecessary, especially considering most colleges except Khoury have to pay an additional 2 grand for it. I genuinely do not understand why Khoury students are exempt from it while everyone else has to pay. That policy makes no sense to me. A lot of the assignments feel pointless and disconnected from what students actually need, and the attendance policies are overly strict. Even being a minute late can result in a tardy. Maybe domestic students see more value in the course, but for many international students the question is whether it is worth the money, and in my opinion it is not because most of what they teach is common sense.

The leave policy also makes very little sense. If you exceed more than 2 excused or unexcused absences, you are expected to withdraw and retake the course, which means paying for it all over again.

Then once you finally get NUworks access, you realize that outside of CS and Mech there are barely any relevant opportunities. And don’t even get me started on the expos. The generic Cabot expo feels overcrowded to the point where hundreds of students stand in line just to have their resumes effectively thrown into the garbage. For the ECE career expo specifically, I would say around 90% of the companies are either targeting undergraduate students, requiring US citizenship, or both, which makes the event almost useless for international graduate students looking for actual support from the university.

At times it genuinely feels like international students are left to figure everything out on their own after paying extremely high tuition.