The Office of Professional Practice (OPP) at Purdue University focuses more on providing distinctive learning and discovery opportunities to our students that cannot be found at other institutions and thus, clearly separate our graduates from those of other institutions. OPP offers cooperative education programs that are truly unique. Our Co-Op employers inform us that we are still the only univer
sity in the country that offers a 5-session Co-Op program that starts right after the first year. Within this program, students can participate in approximately 18-months of work-integrated learning (WIL) sessions before they graduate in five years. In addition, our award-winning GEARE (Global Alliance for Research and Education) program is the only program in the country that combines three main aspects of global engineering education into one overall student experience: (1) two work-integrated learning sessions, one domestic and one international, each approximately three months in length; (2) one semester of study abroad with fully transferrable credits and (3) participation in a team- oriented global design team project with students from multi-cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, we launched our new G-PAL (Global Partners in Apprenticeship Learning) program, which was specifically designed to provide professional opportunities to our growing international undergraduate student body, which sometimes has difficulties finding US domestic opportunities. This is another one-of-a-kind program that partners an international student with a domestic student in both a cultural and a work-integrated learning session. Finally, we just approved a new masters- level cooperative education program. Students who graduate from this program will not only meet all M.Sc. degree requirements, but in addition have significant graduate-level industrial experience within a profession of their choice. The availability of the MS-level cooperative education program will uniquely position Purdue University since no such program currently exists at our peer institutions. The program will significantly enhance the recruitment of new graduate students and the retention of Purdue undergraduates for graduate studies.
