Congrats, you’ve almost made it through the first month of the winter 2018 term! If you’re on co-op right now, and still haven’t “warmed up” to it (haha please appreciate my awful joke), here are 7 reasons to appreciate the fact that your co-op sequence worked out this way.
1. No walking to class in -20 degree weather!
When you’re in school, you’re forced to go outside multiple times per day to walk to all your classes. When you’re in school in the winter term, that pretty much means freezing your face off multiple times per day for 3 months straight (yay Canada!). But if you’re on co-op, you get to spend your days in a cozy, heated office laughing at all your friends who are in school right now.
2. Winter is the best season for professional clothes.
Dressing professionally in the summer can be tough because you generally aren’t allowed to wear shorts or tank tops to the office. Summer is truly the best season for cute, fun clothes, but the worst for dressing in work-appropriate clothing. Winter, however, is perfect for the kind of conservative clothing most workplaces expect you to wear. You might even be able to wear cozy sweaters, depending on your workplace.
3. Full-time employees are still in holiday mode when you start.
Winter co-op starts in January, which means, like you, all the full-time employees are just coming off the holidays. This is great because it means you’re not the only one trying to adjust to being back to work. It lets you ease into your new job rather than being thrown into the middle of a regular work season while all the full-time employees are in hardcore work mode.
4. The decrease in your social life isn’t so bad in the winter.
If you have a co-op term somewhere other than Waterloo, your social life tends to slow down a bit simply because you’re not in the same city as your friends. If there’s a season when this is least problematic it’s definitely winter. Let’s be honest, when it’s cold and icy outside you’d rather be curled up on your couch with a hot drink than trekking through the snow to meet your friends or waiting in line at a bar anyway.
5. Work gives you the extra motivation you need to get up on time.
There’s something about cold weather that makes it SO FREAKING HARD to leave your warm bed in the morning. When you’re in school, it can be extremely tempting to sleep in later than you should, or just skip your class altogether. When you’re on a work term, you’re less likely to waste those extra minutes snoozing your alarms and risking being late. It helps to know there are other people counting on you to show up where you’re supposed to be. And you’re getting paid to be at work, which also helps ?
6. There are fewer fun things in Waterloo to miss out on during the winter term.
There are always fun or interesting things happening on and around campus, things that you have to miss out on if you’re out of town for co-op. However, the best of these things tend to happen in the fall and spring terms. For example, fall term has orientation week, which is a lot of fun to volunteer for. Fall term also has the best Welcome Week activities of any term by far. Spring term has Canada Day celebrations at CIF, occasional beach trips organized by Feds or faculty societies, and patio season at Bomber. Winter term has… snow?
7. Winter terms and co-op terms both happen to be the best times for Netflix binges.
When you’re in school, there is ALWAYS work to be done, whether it’s doing an assignment or studying for your next midterm. This means it’s usually not a good idea to stay in bed all day and binge your favourite show. But during work terms, you go to work and then you get home from work and you have actual free time when you don’t feel obligated to study (crazy, right??). Work terms are therefore the best terms for Netflix. It just so happens that winter is also the season when you’re most likely to want to stay in and do nothing but watch your favourite show. So if your co-op term falls during the winter, then you are perfectly set to binge your little heart out on all the shows you feel guilty about watching too much during school.
So if you’re working this term, enjoy! Appreciate all these little things that make winter co-ops so great. (If you’re in school this term, haha, sucks to be you. Just kidding. You’ll get a reading week in a month… I won’t.)
Have a great term!