For Mona Chen ’14, a summer internship with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) was as eye opening as the company’s Dark Magic Extra Bold blend.
“I wasn’t filing paper or getting coffee,” Chen says of her experience. Instead, her boss asked her to work on the coffee giant’s groundbreaking deal to create a new beverage system with Coca-Cola. “I was working on tons of presentations for my bosses to assess that this was a doable project,” she notes of the internship, which she secured through UVM’s Career Center. For Chen, the role with GMCR offered a taste of engineering management, a bonus given her long-term goal of earning an MBA. But Chen isn’t quite done with GMCR. She’ll start working full-time for its Keurig unit in June.
‘A HIDDEN GEM’
Chen’s experience – finding a hands-on summer internship that provided both specific expertise and, eventually, a full-time job -- isn’t unusual for students at the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, notes Danielle Gallant, senior career counselor at the University’s Career Center.
“CEMS students have the character and skills needed to enter today’s global market,” she notes. Executives, for their part, view internships as training grounds for new hires. What’s driving these opportunities? For one, Burlington’s tech scene is thriving, leading Techie.com to cite the Queen City as one of the most promising tech hubs to watch in 2014 . And companies that one might not think of as “tech” firms – such as Burton Snowboards – also have a high demand for engineering expertise. That helped CEMS mechanical engineering student Logan Williams to secure a Burton internship last year.
“There’s a smaller Silicon Valley here, with a lot of tech companies that are doing innovative work,” Gallant notes. For CEMS students, that means the ability to work with companies that are growing rapidly. Vermont is “a hidden gem. We’re just starting to get on people’s radar.” Firms outside Vermont are also turning to CEMS students for filling their internship roles, such as Boston’s State Street Corporation, which has set aside two internship opportunities for University of Vermont students with a strength in IT or Computer Science, Gallant notes.
AN EXPANDED COMMITMENT
At the same time, UVM has expanded its commitment to internship opportunities, as part of the Career Success Action Plan created at the request of President Tom Sullivan. The college is in the process of hiring a full-time career counselor who will be embedded with CEMS, with that professional solely dedicated to assisting CEMS students with tapping internships and career opportunities. The chance to work on coding attracted Michael Fickes ’14 to LORD Microstrain, a Williston-based sensor company. The Computer Science major began working there last summer, with a focus on adding new features and fixing bugs in Node Commander, an application used to configure settings for wireless nodes, which measure data ranging from humidity to torque.
Both Fickes and Chen negotiated to extend their internships into the academic year. In Fickes’ case, he spends two afternoons a week digging into software problems at LORD Microstrain. “The opportunity to go in and solve problems all day was great,” Fickes says. “It’s what I do for fun.”