Lexi Mills

French major Lexi Mills knows that it’s never too late to join the co-op program at UVic. After completing the coursework for her degree in four years, Lexi went on to do twelve months of back-to-back co-op work terms that have taken her from the BC Legislature to international bookseller AbeBooks to Western Digital Thailand.

Lexi’s first co-op job was as a tour guide at the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in summer 2016, where she led tours in French and English, gaining valuable experience in tourism while putting her French skills to work.

Her second co-op position was a double work term as a human resources assistant at AbeBooks, an online bookseller founded and based here in Victoria, where her workload included event planning and conducting job interviews. “That was an amazing opportunity,” she says.

Her third and final co-op position took her all the way to Thailand, where she worked at computer hard disk drive manufacturer Western Digital, again in human resources. There, working in the department responsible for the company’s co-op student hires, Lexi ran English proficiency assessments for the company’s 80 Thai co-op students, as well as cultural events and English and public speaking classes for 100 total co-op students from all over the world, including Canada, Turkey, South Africa, Germany, Jordan, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, and Japan.

Looking back on her time with UVic co-op, Lexi says that she’s developed important skills—adaptability and time management, to name a few—but also, perhaps more surprisingly, “the ability to just be positive no matter what.” She explains, “a lot of the time, with these co-op jobs, you don’t know exactly what you’re stepping into; you’re taking a risk. The employer is taking a risk on you as well. So just going into it with an open mind, knowing that no matter what the position actually looks like at the end, you’re going to gain skills that will help you for the rest of your life.”