Computers and capital: inside Abby Cossette’s unique co-op and the benefactors that helped enable it

For students who find it nerve-wracking to raise their hands in class, leading a meeting of career investment professionals would be imposing. Doing it their second week on the job would be terrifying.

“For Khoury people who have combined majors: don’t be afraid to venture out of a software dev position for co-op and do something in your other major,” Cossette said. “Especially at a small company, you can make the role your own.”

Enthusiasm for travel and the value of a Northeastern co-op
The path that Abby Cossette has walked these last few months began several years ago, when two families took inspiration from the adventures of their sons.

The first was the Thomas family. In 2018, as their younger son Joe was finishing his journalism degree at Northeastern, his parents, avid travelers Kelly and Matthew, established The Joe Thomas Explore the World Fund to help provide Northeastern journalism students with opportunities for international experiences.

“Travel enriches your life, spirit, and intellect,” Kelly Thomas noted. “Travel expands your expectations of what is possible and your understanding of other people and cultures. And it’s fun.”

Northeastern’s student journalists immediately took advantage. For work conducted in Cuba in 2019, three fund recipients—Jonathan Mejia, Seamus McAvoy, and Collyn Stephens—won local Emmys for reporting on Cuba’s novel 3G network, longtime reliance on traditional medicine, and hip hop, respectively.

The following year, enamored of the fund’s success, the Thomases expanded their support to Khoury College, where their older son Max had enrolled as a graduate student. The Max Thomas Explore the World Fund offers annual awards to Khoury College students for international experiences.

“We are aiming to change lives,” Kelly Thomas said. “The changes may be small or profound, but travel will change you.”

Several years prior, UK-born Rory Higginson made his own international learning journey.

“I don’t think we understood the value of co-op when Rory applied,” Higginson said. “But after his first co-op, I could see why this could be incredibly helpful to him. And it was a program that Par Equity could benefit from.”

Par Equity is an Edinburgh-based, award-winning, early-stage venture capital firm that Higginson had co-founded seven years prior. It focuses on high-growth, Northern-UK tech startups and, unlike most of its peers, benefits from a large network of angel investors who help the company find, evaluate, and grow investment opportunities.

The company was unique, and its co-op opportunity would be too. Venture capital firms tend to run small, so they don’t hire many people, let alone students without professional qualifications and years of experience.

Such a position demanded a student confident enough to assume leadership duties overseas, one with financial savvy, tech awareness, and—in the case of the fall 2021 co-op—an informatics affinity. Back across the Atlantic, a Northeastern student matching that description was waiting.

Domain knowledge from combining computer science and business
Like innumerable students, Abby Cossette spent her first co-op at Wayfair, one of Northeastern’s co-op partners. As a pricing and profitability co-op, she was charged with SQL coding in the company’s pricing database and engineering a Google BigQuery dashboard to highlight database issues.

But before that co-op, Cossette had ditched her computer science–engineering major after discovering her preference for front-end software over hardware. The computer science and business administration combined major with a concentration in finance—offered between Khoury College and the D’Amore McKim School of Business—allowed her to explore “the quantitative side of business.”

“What I did at Wayfair wasn’t finance-related; it was strictly e-commerce plus database work,” Cossette noted. “I wanted to expose myself to the finance world because I hadn’t been around many finance classes. And I really wanted to go abroad in Europe. And then I saw this.”

For Cossette, the Par Equity co-op in Scotland was ideally timed. But even as Par’s early hiring, Cossette’s proactivity, and the easing of pandemic restrictions made travel logistics easier, she still faced substantial visa, travel, and housing costs. This is where the Explore the World scholarship—as well as the Presidential Global Scholarship—made a big difference.

When she arrived in Edinburgh, Cossette found herself thrown into the fire right away.

“Startup companies apply for funding on our client management system, and I do an initial screening of those applications and figure out if they’re a good fit for us,” Cossette explained. “We try not to invest in companies that lack defensible intellectual property. It ends up being a lot of deep tech, AI stuff, energy tech, clean tech … It’s helpful to have a STEM background because without it, it’s hard to pick up on what these companies are doing.”

Presenting promising firms to the investment committee each week was a crucial and regular activity at Par Equity, one Higginson said Cossette “had no problem whatsoever” with. But the co-op’s other main element was specific to Cossette.

“We wanted somebody with an informatics background who could help us with database design, new technologies, and building on the venture capital investment process to improve our in-house processes and systems,” Higginson said. “She can help us fine tune and build our systems, and work with third-party developers on our behalf to develop those improvements in productivity, customer relations, and our investment profile.”

Her Wayfair database work was good preparation.

“Right now we don’t store our data in one database and we’ve had many inefficiency issues because of that,” Cossette said of Par Equity. “We store data in various Excel trackers on our server, and then manually input that data into our client management system.”

Her role required she keep a close eye on the process. “There’s a lot of unnecessary data duplication and room for human error,” she said. “The advantage of a database is that it’s one central data source, and then you can launch an application programming interface and pull from it.”

As the firm’s sole co-op, Cossette has varied other responsibilities: marketing campaigns, portfolio company follow-on rounds, and aiding investment managers with deals they’re closing.

“Abby is fantastic … she is extremely confident, very well organized,” Higginson said. “She’s done her job extraordinarily well. She’s brought a lot of domain knowledge that we wouldn’t have in house.”

Cossette’s database work will require months to complete, so she wrote a schema that Par can hand to a third-party engineer after she leaves. She’ll continue part-time from the US until she lands another role, but, according to Higginson, she’s already fulfilled the expectations set by her predecessors, two of whom—Sydney Couval and Jennifer Chou—recently landed full-time finance industry positions.

As far as co-ops go, Par Equity is more than happy with their investment.

Global co-op an opportunity to “rethink my life”
For Cossette, there are many advantages of a global co-op in Edinburgh. For one, she said, “The size of the city is perfect. You can walk anywhere and that makes it feel like a small town; it’s not overcrowded. But it’s also a decent-sized city with a ton of things to do. The architecture is beautiful.”

Cossette, who shares the Thomases’ traveling inclination, also gushed about the city’s location, noting the cheap flights she took to Malta, Rome, and Iceland once COVID-19 safety restrictions eased. She also visited London for a business trip after Par closed an investment round in a startup, which proved especially fruitful.

“I was sitting with the [startup’s] CEO at a pub drinking some pints, and she was asking me about my interests,” Cossette recalled. “I said I was interested in quantitative and algorithmic trading because it’s a good bridge between programming and finance. And she had a university friend who’s the engineering COO of an algorithmic trading company in London. She got me an interview with them for my next co-op.”

That co-op will be Cossette’s last, as she is set to graduate in the spring of 2023. She may pursue a graduate degree in financial engineering, and would explore the University of Edinburgh if so.

“I feel at home here,” she said. “I fell in love with it. I feel like I lived here in another life. It’s made me rethink my life; I think I’ll try to come here full-time after graduation. Or somewhere in the UK.”

Abby Cossette and Claire Cramm, a Par Equity employee and Northeastern alumna, in Deans Village.

It’s the ideal reaction in the eyes of those helping to fund the opportunities.

“To the students considering a global experience: do it,” Kelly Thomas implored. “Please spend our money. Challenge yourself. Step outside your comfort zone. Do the thing you have been dreaming of doing.”

Put another way?

“Go global,” Cossette said. “It’s amazing.”

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