[jchor]

Do u go to Waterloo? I'm an alumn there and have been through this many times.

My advice is that your first few jobs are very important. I have done countless interviews (as an interviewer) myself and when it comes to selecting students to interview, the coversheet with the companies you worked for and the titles on them usually count the most. So if you want to be a dev and get leg up on the competition then make sure that you get a dev job as soon as you can and this way you can jump ahead of the curve. I have seen a lot of people take an IT job early in their co-op careers and they paid for that mistake later. But all said and done, no matter what happens its what you make of it. Let me know if you want some hints on how to get noticed. There area lot of things that you can do to stand-out and get noticed.

In principle, here are the basic 3 steps.

1. Submit kick-ass resume that gets noticed and selected. 2. Interview for the job. 3. Negotiate terms of your offer. This is more-so for FTE, but interns can negotiate a lot of things too if they choose to do so.

To answer your question though, do you think that this company can help you learn and explore an area that you are interested in? If so, then go for it. Co-op is the time to explore and really go out there and try things out with little risk and to network. My biggest regret from my co-op was not going to Europe, Japan, and other places for opportunities. I did 5/6 of my internships in the US and I felt that really hampered the opportunities that I would have had now if I went further out.

Good Luck!