You’ve heard of senioritis — that fog that settles over your final year, where motivation drops and everything starts to feel “optional”.
But let me introduce you to her less glamorous, more chaotic cousin: co-opitis.
Co-opitis hits when you come back from co-op and have to remember how to be a student again. It doesn’t matter if you’re a sophomore, junior, or about-to-graduate senior — co-opitis doesn’t discriminate. It’s the mental and academic whiplash of trading Outlook calendars for Canvas, office meetings for midterms, and a paycheck for attendance points.
You spend months waking up early, sending emails that start with “Per my last message,” and getting paid actual money. Then, one day, you’re back in a lecture hall, watching a professor scribble partial derivatives on the board, staring at your Workday registration screen, trying to piece together your schedule like it’s a chaotic game of Tetris — except none of the blocks fit, half the courses conflict, and your academic advisor just left you on read.
Everyone else has moved on without you. Your friends bonded over that one brutal class last semester. The professors forgot who you were. The department added a new prerequisite you didn’t even know existed. And suddenly, you’re “off-cycle,” which is academic-speak for “good luck figuring it out.”
But beyond the scheduling mess, co-opitis is a deeper kind of shift. It’s the strange feeling of sitting in class and realizing your attention span has been permanently formatted into 30-minute meeting blocks. It’s wanting to ask your professor for a deliverable timeline and KPIs. It’s logging into a group project and instinctively checking for a Teams meeting link that doesn’t exist.
You came back changed — and that’s not a bad thing. You’ve seen the other side. You know what a real job looks like. You understand why your degree matters. But that doesn’t make the transition back easy.
Co-opitis is real. It’s weird. It’s uncomfortable. It’s watching your color-coded co-op calendar turn into a panic-coded academic one. It’s wondering when “How was your weekend?” turned into “Can you send me the homework?” And it’s fighting the urge to schedule a one-on-one just to ask your TA a question.
But it also means you’re growing. You’ve leveled up. And even if your Workday plan of study still looks like a design challenge for stressed-out engineers, you’re going to be okay.
So to everyone back from co-op and trying to remember how to study, how to socialize, how to even school — welcome back. You’re just coping with co-opitis.
If you survived Excel formulas and Teams calls, you can survive this too.
Disclaimer: This article is part of The Stupe and is satire
