Co-op to career: work experience goes full time

Learn more about the Bachelor of Business Administration. 

Aoi Hashimoto has spent plenty of time in lecture halls and classrooms, but the Royal Roads Bachelor of Business Administration graduate benefited from some of her most practical education outside the halls of academia — thanks to a student co-op. 

It even got her a full-time job. 

Hashimoto, who was born in Japan but spent a large portion of her childhood in the U.K. and U.S. as her family moved with her father, a health researcher, for his work., She first studied architecture in her homeland, but near the end of her degree program, , she decided she didn’t want to pursue a career in the field. 

“I noticed… all the problems started with money and ended with money. And I thought, in the end, everything is a business,” she says. “And I was more interested in the business side.” 

Co-op continued experiential learning 

Her business interests prompted her to enroll at RRU, which led her to a career fair and a co-op with Reliable Controls, a 40-year-old building automation company based in Victoria, BC. She began her placement as a member of the small marketing team and says she spent most of the four months training. 

“You don't have to just sit and listen to lectures. You get to actually do things yourself and attack a project or problem yourself… It's easier for me to apply it to my job.” 

That experiential learning echoed the hands-on education she’d enjoyed at Royal Roads, where she and her classmates learned how to give presentations and use marketing tools on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram — the same tools she would use at Reliable. 

But there was more to the business-to-business, or B2B, side of marketing she had to learn, including the use and value of networking and trade shows. Despite having to absorb new methods and skills from scratch, she was offered a full-time job before her four-month co-op was complete.  Once her schooling was finished, she began as a marketing co-ordinator, handling social media, advertising and outreach. 

That was almost a year ago and Hashimoto says, “My job grew and grew within the year.” 

Learning to collaborate and communicate 

In addition to experiential learning, she says another aspect of her Royal Roads education has served her well on the job: project-based collaboration in teams often separated by location and distinguished by different backgrounds and cultures. 

“We are all friends,” she says of her RRU cohort, “but we also have to work together towards a project. And I think a lot of our classmates did very well with that — meeting the deadlines, respecting each other's time and respecting each other — but of course we all have different cultures.  

“And it did make me learn a lot about how to communicate with people with different backgrounds. It was hard in a way. We had conflicts, but in the end, I'm really glad I worked with my cohort because I learned a lot from them." 

Asked about the BBA program, Hashimoto says, “You don't have to just sit and listen to lectures. You get to actually do things yourself and attack a project or problem yourself… It's easier for me to apply it to my job.”