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I have to chime in here to say this can be a glass half-full kind of situation, depending on the kid. I knew someone who was an engineering major and got a summer job at a well known tech firm in Silicon Valley. He realized that engineering was not what he wanted to do as a career, but he made such a good impression on his manager that they wanted to keep him, it was a question of doing what. He ended up working for that company in marketing and is now a successful executive in product development and marketing. So a coop (although 6 months is longer than a summer) can still open doors, even if they weren’t the doors you originally anticipated.</p>