The Give & Take of the Co-op program

Life as a Co-op Advisor

By Campbell Meeks ’04

If you were like me, you spent an hour or two a term talking to your co-op advisor—just enough time to find a job and get his or her signature on your registration form. Most students never get to know their co-op faculty as well as they do their academic faculty. How many people really know what co-op advisors do when they’re not signing forms? I recently interviewed co-op advisors Eric Miller ’71 and Susan Eklund-Leen about their jobs in hopes of clearing up some of the mystery.

Q: What is your job as a co-op advisor?

Eric: We have two roles. One is to work with a subset of the students who are our advisees, with whom we have a one-on-one relationship and help coordinate their overall academic program in conjunction with their academic advisors. Our other role is as job supervisors, where we work with a subset of our co-op employers and advise students on the specifics of working with those employers.

Susan: In addition to that, since we’re faculty, we have to live the life of the faculty member with professional development and those kinds of things. We all have our own agendas of professional development that we’re following.

Q: What are your professional interests?

E: We’re all different as far as where that part of our lives is going. For most of us it does touch back on co-op. My stuff is cross-cultural/experiential learning, and other people take other aspects: Tom is education/administration, for instance. How people experience culture is my interest, and the learning that happens in that process, especially going between cultures. I’m particularly interested in it as it relates to identity issues, both in a broad sense of how it applies to everyone, but also in the narrower sense of how it applies to minority people and minority identity issues.

S: I’m a practical kind of person, so the things I become interested in are more practice than theory. I’ve been upgrading computer skills quite a bit, and working on a complete overhaul of our job database, which is exciting for me. I’m taking some classes which are helping me conceptualize all of that. I’ve also started playing a little bit with the artist in me. I’ve become very interested in digital photography and using that as a method of documenting experiences.

Q: What is the best part of your job?

S: The biggest reward for me is watching my advisees walk across the Mound. That’s the tangible part. And the most fun is receiving the students back after their co-ops, because there’s very obvious change we can see, knowing the student when they left versus meeting the new student that they are when they come back.

E: For me, it’s interesting because it’s very vicarious. I just had a student come in this morning who got one of the best evaluations that I’ve ever seen. It’s the only time I’ve had an employer refer to a student as “inspiring.” The hair on my arm stands up just thinking about it.

S: Also, I could be having a conversation with a student about working at Sekim one hour and the next hour have a conversation with a student about some really heavy-duty science lab work they were doing, and an hour later have a conversation with a student who worked at an alternative school. We’ve got a lot of variety in our work, so we end up knowing a lot about a whole bunch of different things, which makes our lives kind of mixed up, but it’s that mixed-up-ness that makes it really exciting, too.

E: I’ve been here for a little more than an hour today, and I’ve spoken to a student just coming back from co-op in Colorado, I’ve had an email exchange with a student in Sekim, and an email exchange with an alum in San Francisco who’s connecting us with a co-op in Mexico. Another one of the most exciting things is when a student goes out on a co-op and they come back and say “now I know what I want to do.” I’ve had students go out vaguely interested in sustainability or permaculture and come back botanists.

Q: How do you set-up and maintain co-op jobs?

S: Eric already gave you the example of an alum. That happens quite often. Sometimes we go out looking for employers. Often an employer will refer a potential employer to us. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. Establishing a good relationship with an employer is really critical. They rely on the co-op faculty member to be their main contact; we’re the face of the college to those employers. It’s easy to disappoint them if they don’t get a student every term because they’re real jobs that have to be done.

Q: How do you go about matching students with jobs?

E: There are so many unknowns that it’s more of an art than a science. Also, you usually don’t have ten students vying for one job, so we may not be able to make as good a match as we could if we looked at all the students and said “I know you’ll do great here.” And sometimes nobody’s interested in a great job. I have really good jobs that went unfilled this summer because nobody applied.

S: Popularity of jobs ebbs and flows. At one point in the early 90s I could not put an organic farm on the list fast enough. People were at my door, snatching them up. That doesn’t happen today. The desires of students can change more quickly than the job market. It’s hard to know what a student five years from now is going to want. We offer an educational program—when you become an Antioch student, you have to select among the array of courses, and you have to select among the array of jobs. We do allow students to do own plans. That’s an option, like an independent study. You can design it yourself. We have the same kinds of variety and offerings in jobs that we have in classes.

E: Sometimes students, especially younger students, come in with an idea of what their perfect job would be, and it has five specific elements. Getting that perfect job is going to be really difficult, so you prioritize. You’ve got five co-ops so maybe you can get one or two of those five elements in each co-op.

Both Eric and Susan emphasized how critical co-op is in an Antioch education, and their hopes that neither the students nor other community members take co-op for granted. Certainly in my experience Antioch would not be Antioch without co-op.