You wake up at six to get ready for the day. You have to be at work by nine. You quickly shower, get dressed,make your breakfast, pack lunch and head out the door for work. Eight hours later, five o’clock finally comes and with it, the end of your work day. You head home and have several hours to do what you will until you go to bed. The next morning, you wake up and do it all again.

This is the typical day of a student on co-op. It’s a simple routine, one gone through with ease. It took a while to get used to waking up at ungodly hours and eight-hour work days.

The real world –a taste of your reality after college –feels nice. In fact, it may seem less stressful than being enrolled in classes. No daily homework assignments, papers to write or quizzes and exams to study for. The end of your day is just that, the end of your day. Nothing from the day carries over into the night, or the next day. You just pick up where you left off the day before.

Not to say co-op doesn’t come with its stresses. You finally have a job, a real job. Paid or unpaid, it’s the first job you’ve had that relates to your field of study. It’s your foot in the door, an opportunity most students don’t get during their college career.

You won’t be treated like a student. For six months, that part of your life is over. You will be treated like and held to the same standards as any other employee. You will have your own function in the company and you will need to perform it impeccably. In spite of all this, it’s still easier.

Six months of full time work. You get used to its hardshipsand its liberties. And when those six months are up, it’s back to classes, homework, writing papers and studying and your mind just can’t seem to process that. The transition from one to the other can be bumpy. What was once routine and familiar is now foreign.

You feel overwhelmed, perhaps out of place and that’s understandable. You are going through a form of culture shock. This can be described as disorientation and nervousness, at times, fear, when leaving leaving a familiar culture and entering a new one. In the case of a student coming back from co-op, the culture you are accustomed to is the lifestyle of a fully employed adult and a formal workplace, and you are not entering a new culture, but returning to an old one; one that you have in fact lived in for the majority of your life, school.

This may be especially stressful for students coming out of a fall co-op into a spring term. Unlike with spring co-op, you don’t have two months to rest and prepare yourself for the coming semester, only a mere three weeks, if that.

So, you’re wondering, how am I going to do this? Well, you were conditioned into the work environment, just as you were conditioned into theschool environment all those years ago, and you can do it again. With every change, even familiar ones, there’s an adjustment period. Here are some tips to make the transition a little easier:

1. Remember, you’ve done this before. Keep in mind: school, it’s nothing new. You’ve suffered through it all before.
2. Rely on friends: Friends can always provide comfort and support during hard times. It’s likely you have friends that are going through the same thing and can relate.
3. Don’t be afraid to ask for help: Friends are great, but they can’t do it all. Northeastern has a number of amenities to help you academically as well as mentally and emotionally like We Care and the University Health and Counseling Services.

Take each day at a time. You’ll get back into the groove of being in classes in no time.

Photo courtesy Creative Commons, Jason Walsh.