Co‑ops and internships have been misunderstood.
In my humble opinion, the co‑op – and by extension, the internship – was born from the spirit of the apprenticeship. A concept built not on transactions, but on transformation. For generations, people who were curious and serious about learning a trade or profession would spend years – sometimes decades – alongside masters. They would watch, try, fail, reflect, and try again. They learned not just techniques, but temperament. Not just how to work, but how to become.
But somewhere along the way, the world decided it didn’t have time for that.
Patience became a luxury, and the long, slow climb of apprenticeship was replaced with the sprint of a short-term placement. The co‑op became a line on a résumé. The internship, a hurdle to cross before real life could begin. And as the structure shifted, so did the intent. Employers began seeing it as a way to bring in low-cost labor. Students, increasingly burdened by the financial and psychological pressure to be “job-ready,” started seeing it as a necessary evil – an awkward blend of stress, rejection, and paperwork, often ending in disappointment. What was once an intimate rite of passage became, for many, a cold transaction with a ticking clock.
And it’s a loss on all sides. Because co‑ops and internships, when done right, are not about getting work done. They are about becoming someone who can do the work well.
I’ve spent more than two decades mentoring post-graduate students, and it’s rare to meet someone who is truly excited about their co-op. Most see it as something they have to survive. And frankly, most employers aren’t set up to do it any differently either. Between short project timelines, tight margins, and limited mentorship capacity, even those with good intentions struggle to provide more than a cursory glimpse into what the profession truly is.
We didn’t end up here because people stopped caring. We ended up here because the structures stopped allowing us to care in the same way.
The apprenticeship model was always built on time – time to learn, time to fail, time to observe, time to grow. There was no illusion of instant mastery. There was trust in the long game. An understanding that transformation requires immersion. And most of all, it was built on proximity to excellence. The apprentice didn’t learn from a lecture or a project management tool. They learned by being near greatness – by sweeping the floor next to it, carrying water for it, and eventually being handed the brush. Traditional apprenticeships didn’t promise money. They offered something far more valuable: the gift of time, the privilege of being mentored, and the quiet promise that one day, the apprentice, too, would become the master.
It’s hard to recreate that depth in a 16-week internship. But it’s not impossible.
We just have to ask better questions. What if we treated interns not as cheap labor, but as future stewards of our field? What if we replaced “tasks” with “teaching moments”? What if we saw the co-op not as a favor to the student or a cost-saving for the company, but as a long-term investment in the profession itself?
That means reimagining the co‑op not as a program, but as a relationship. The best internships I’ve seen didn’t come from rigid handbooks or predetermined KPIs. They came from a mentor who took the time to understand what the student was curious about, and from a student who saw the opportunity as a portal into something bigger than themselves. They emerged from trust. From shared purpose. From the unspoken understanding that “I will help you learn this, because someone once helped me.”
There’s a reason mentorship remains one of the most powerful forms of leadership. It doesn’t scale easily. It doesn’t promise efficiency. But it is, in almost every case, unforgettable.
There’s also a lesson here in what we choose to value. In a world obsessed with speed and outcomes, it’s easy to forget that the best things in life rarely announce themselves with clarity at the beginning. Apprenticeship wasn’t meant to be clear or fast. It was meant to be immersive. Incomplete. Iterative. The learning emerges slowly, like film developing in a dark room. And you only start to see it when you stop rushing the process.
To get there, we need to create more room – for curiosity, for humility, for slowness. We need to encourage both students and employers to approach the co-op not as a test to pass, but as a conversation to begin. One rooted in mutual benefit, mutual respect, and mutual responsibility.
Because co‑ops and internships, at their best, are not stepping stones. They are transformations in motion.
They’re about what happens when someone with knowledge slows down long enough to share it, and someone with potential shows up with enough openness to receive it. They’re about the possibility that one day, the intern you taught might teach someone else. They’re about restoring the soul of the apprenticeship in a world that’s in danger of forgetting why it ever mattered in the first place.
And maybe, just maybe, they’re about something even more radical: believing that becoming is more important than arriving.