I wanted to take a minute or so to describe to people how my co-op has helped me learn new things since I began my work term in the beginning of January. Co-op, for those who do not know, is the Canadian equivalent of an Internship, and is very valuable experience. Also, it takes a year off the time required to become a Professional Engineer post-grad, which is nice.

I have aquired a number of skills through co-op already, all of which I can certainly add to my resume:

• MySQL Servers
  
• PHP
  
• Message Passing Interface (MPI)
  
• CUDA (nVidia's GPU Architecture language)
  
• Atmel (Well, beginning to...)
  
• Linux Servers
  
• CentOS, FreeBSD, Fedora
  
• SSH, SFTP
  
• Network Programming in C# and C/C++
  
• RS232 Communication in C#
  
• MySQL in PHP and C
  
• HTML and Javascript

No, I'm not necessarily an expert in all of these fields, but I feel like every day I learn something new, and I'm motivated to learn.

I can't describe how good it feels to accomplish something or create something that is actually going to get some use in the field.

If anyone out there is trying to decide whether Co-op or an Internship is the right option, I, from experience, can tell you it's one of the best choices you make, purely from the experience you get out of it. (Not to mention the contacts, it's never too early to start making contacts).

If anyone has cool work term experiences (or work term face palm moments, I've had many of those... stupid unplugged RS232 Cable...) they want to share, please comment!