Engineering Interns Help Cornell Technology Startups Bloom Into Successful Ventures

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.

Featured in photo: Engineering Management student Ron Yang and his Winternship sponsor/advisor from Exotanium, Zhiming Shen.

Article excerpt from eShip magazine, March, 2020.