As Northeastern students, we all have the privilege to experience co-op. While every student has a different co-op experience, almost all of us begin in one place: myNEU COOL. This dreadful web portal can be found under the “Experiential Learning/Co-op” tab in myNEU, and it serves as the cornerstone of the co-op application process.
As an aspiring software engineer, I see the web app as reliable, but in need of serious improvements. It is worth noting that it is not fair to criticize a reliable service and claim it needs (emphasis on needs) fixing, rather we the idea is the service can be improved. The areas for potential improvement are many, but it may be wise to start with the obvious: the web app is boring to look at and the interface is antiquated. They are made by separate peoples presumably, but one might argue that the myNEU user interface is nicer, and that is not something written lightly. Now beyond the drab colors, the next item is the basic search options. When an aspiring co-op looks for jobs, you are presented with a number of ways to filter all of the available jobs. This includes application status, your previously prescribed level of interest, and the levels of experience needed. The real issue arises when you want to sort the entire list. For some reason, the only relevant sorting option on this list is Company name, date posted, and job level. While there are other sorting metrics, none create a reliably sorted list. The rest of the options are simple true or false flags that create a pseudo alphabetical list that should simply be a filter to begin with! Sorting schema are one of the fundamentals of creating a database, and the ability may very well be available on the backend. Why can’t I sort by distance from the university, wage, or review score?
Now the flaws above of the sorting ability of myNEU Cool are apparent, and just the beginning of the issue, but the web app also suffers from lack of data entry. Plenty of the job entrees are incompletely filled out, and some are misleading. It would be worth investing whether these are entered directly by employers or by Northeastern faculty, but it certainly hurts the usefulness of the app. Improvements in this facet are not software related, instead it is related to standard enforcement. Again it is worth noting that one can certainly understand if the University prefers having more entries to having perfectly reliable entries.
