Yup, it’s been four years since I started college and no I wasn’t wearing a gown this week. I will be wearing one twelve months from today. See, after having two amazing co-op experiences both in San Francisco and London, I’ve decided to extend my time at Northeastern University and do our signature five year program with an extra co-op on my resume. The where and the how is still TBD but I’m not too worried about it because life has taught me that no matter what, things just have a way of working out.
In the meantime, let’s do something crazy.
For the next nine weeks I will be bagpacking around South East Asia with a couple of my closest friends whom I met during my first co-op in California. We will be hitting quite a few spots in the area and planning each day as we go. Ideally, we would like to see Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Happy to hear some suggestions!
The Northeastern Signature
Northeastern has a unique way of changing student’s lives one flight at a time. We are encouraged to travel the world in ways we would have never imagined and see things that completely change the way we think. This past week I celebrated a few of my friend’s graduations and during one of these celebratory dinners I realized how fortunate I was for choosing Northeastern. While looking around the room I noticed how, as an international student from El Salvador, I was surrounded by friends from all around the globe: Lebanon, Costa Rica, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, the US. All of which have had dialogues or co-ops in places like Shanghai, San Francisco, Morocco, Cape Town, Berlin, London, Zambia, Kenya and New Delhi. And these are five out of the thousands of students in the school — it’s breathtaking.
Real Life
Now here’s the thing, in both of my of my co-ops I’ve been exposed to what people call “real life”. You are an adult and you have a job, perhaps also a family, loans, a marriage and a mortgage. Most workplaces offer paid vacations in which you would take a week or two if you manage to find coverage, reschedule meetings, set email forwards and come back to a mountain pile of memo’s and electronic mail. So when people tell me that there will be time to travel in the future, I agree to disagree. This is perhaps the last opportunity I have to take a few months off to travel the world with nothing else than a my phone, my Bible, El Salvador’s flag, a couple of t-shirts and a one way ticket to Bangkok. Life is happening.
London 2.0
So the big question is: then what? Well, I’m on co-op. Last week of June I will be ending my trip back in Bangkok where I will board a flight heading to London. During the following couple of weeks, I will be joining the marketing team at CoderCourse, a start-up company that teaches weekend crash courses to people in small pods that want to build programs in languages like iPhone’s Swift, Android Java and both beginners and advanced versions of Web Ruby on Rails.
Spoiler
For the sake of sincerity, yes I am scared and nervous and anxious, but what would life be without these feelings? And I understand I am putting a huge burden on my parents who have worked really hard to give me nothing but the best, so I appreciate their support and excitement even though this might mean a couple of sleepless nights. I’ve promised to keep them up to date with everywhere we go and will be posting some updates in my blog in case you’d like to sign up for it. Mum and dad, I love you guys!!
