Spotlight Stories
World-Renowned Cooperative Education
The Cooperative Education Program at Northeastern University, also known as a “co-op,” is one of the largest and most innovative in the world, and Northeastern is one of only a few that offers a Co-op Program for Graduate Students. Through this program students gain industry experience in a wide variety of organizations, from large companies to entrepreneurial start-ups, while helping to finance their education.
Recent News and Student Spotlights
2026 COE Outstanding Graduate Student Awards
The COE Outstanding Graduate Student Awards for 2026 were awarded to more than 50 graduate students across the Northeastern global campus for their exceptional achievements in research, teaching, leadership, and service.
From Co-op to Full-Time: How Northeastern Launched Malaviya’s Career in Cybersecurity
Jainil Malaviya is a current student in the MS in Information Systems program. With a bachelor’s degree in computer science, where he built a strong foundation in programming, data structures, algorithms, and software development, he shares how Northeastern’s co-op program, hands-on coursework, and dedicated mentors helped him land a full-time role as a Security Engineer at Nokia Canada Inc.—before even graduating.
From Technical Foundations to Product Leadership
Vaishnavi Anand Kulkarni, MS’26, is an Information Systems student at Northeastern whose co-op at Google-backed startup Evenness put her at the center of a real product launch, coordinating cross-functional teams and navigating high-stakes decisions firsthand. With a background in computer science and machine learning and a consistent user-first mindset, she is now pursuing full-time product management roles where she can continue building technology that creates meaningful impact.
Building Reliable Systems Through Experience
Shreya Wanisha, MS’26, software engineering systems, leveraged Northeastern’s co-op program to gain hands-on experience in large-scale backend development at Labcorp, where she worked on systems processing over 70 million healthcare records daily—experience that’s shaping her path toward cloud computing and distributed systems engineering.