Professional Experience Program
Our Professional Experience Program provides real world training and work experience for select Engineering Management students by connecting them with industry including local start-up companies in the Praxis Center for Venture Development.
Our alumni connections and cross-campus collaborations provide unique opportunities for students. Students in the program will have the opportunity to build their resume while applying their Engineering Management skills to practice. Project topics could include technology strategy, data analytics, sales and marketing, information exchange, cost and life cycle benefits, resource allocation and forecasting, technology roadmapping or selection, strategic planning, bottom line evaluations, decision analysis and support, quality control, manufacturing, and distribution.
All internships are unpaid and for independent study credit with an Engineering Management faculty member serving as the independent study advisor. The terms of the internship (such as start date, end date, hours per week) are flexible. Internships take place over the summer or winter break.
Information sessions are hosted in the Fall. We work to pair students with companies who are seeking interns; not all students who apply are guaranteed an internship.
Engineering Interns Help Cornell Technology Startups Bloom Into Successful Ventures
By: ESHIP Magazine / 2020
Over the 2020 winter break, graduate students in Cornell's engineering management program started working with companies in the Praxis Center for Venture Development in a new internship program. The engineering management program at Cornell is geared toward engineers who want to stay in a technological environment, but focus on managerial roles.
The program helps startups progress more smoothly and provides real world training and work experience for the student interns. Many of the students will continue to work with their client companies throughout the spring semester.
The Praxis Center is Cornell's newest venture incubator, housed in Duffield Hall, and helps faculty, staff and students launch engineering, digital and physical sciences companies based on Cornell licensed technologies. Opened in March of 2019, the Praxis Center houses eight companies with products ranging from software to hardware and applications from health care products to semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
"I am identifying competitors and creating strategies to set our product apart from theirs," said Ron Yang, an engineering management student with an undergraduate degree in civil engineering. Yang works with Praxis startup company, Exotanium, which reduces costs and improves security for client software applications that run in cloud datacenter such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. The Exotanium software platform is based on Cornell technology developed by Dr. Zhiming Shen and CIS Professors Hakim Weatherspoon and Robbert van Renesse.
Article excerpt from eShip magazine, March, 2020.
Student spotlight: Sanat Karunakaran
Geegah LLC. is a cutting-edge MEMs device startup based in the Praxis Center for Venture Development in Ithaca, New York. Geegah has leveraged their expertise in Ultrasonic MEMs devices to pioneer the advancement sensing device technology. With their patented technology, Geegah are quickly becoming players in the large commercial markets of biometrics and digital agriculture. Geegah were at a nascent stage in their growth as a company and were largely focused on research and development and prototyping of their products for the last few years. Over this past summer, I had the wonderful opportunity of working on their Business Development challenges with their Digital Agriculture division. The first month of the internship required me to do an in-depth competitor analysis. This was required to develop an understanding of all aspects of the Digital Agriculture market: number of competitor startups, price-points available, size of the market, market penetrability, business models being used by the competition, etc. After extensive research, a significant amount of data was gathered and used to generate insights regarding target market segments and starting points to base the Geegah Digital Agriculture business model on. In the remainder of the internship, I developed a dynamic break-even model taking into consideration the various costs associated with running Digital Agriculture division of the company. This was a dynamic model that calculated the real-time cost per customer over a fixed period and frequency of service that would result in breaking even. I also developed the beginnings of a pricing strategy to facilitate optimal profits and market penetration.
The internship was an incredible learning experience that allowed me to apply learnings from my various courses in a real-world setting. Working for a startup posed its own challenges and has definitely contributed greatly towards setting me up for a career in business development roles after graduation. I am incredibly thankful to Geegah and the Engineering Management program at Cornell for facilitating this opportunity for me.