When Northeastern co-op students work alongside Northeastern grads, the energy that results means everybody wins

By Karen Feldscher

Mechanical engineering senior Kareem Ghobrial says his supervisor at General Electric went out of her way to get him started on a great career path.

At EMC, senior Jason Harland reports the folks he works for really appreciate his work ethic and knowledge of electrical engineering.

Over at Deloitte, Sarah Caruso and Bobby Carson, both accounting and finance majors, believe they were given challenging, satisfying work in part because, as Northeastern co-op students, they were labeled quick learners.

Co-op students who work at companies that employ Northeastern graduates say they get unique opportunities because of the Husky connection.

And that’s not all: Employers say they benefit, too.

Bill DePatie, E’86, vice president of hardware engineering at data-storage giant EMC, is broadly enthusiastic about the strong Northeastern presence among his firm’s permanent staff and temporary employees.

“Co-op is one of the few true win-win situations you find in the world,” he says without hesitation.

According to DePatie, roughly a third of EMC’s two hundred student employees come from Northeastern, as do many of its 41,600 staff members. This makes sense. After all, the company, headquartered in Hopkinton, Mass­a­chusetts, was founded in 1979 by Roger Marino, E’61, H’96, and the late Richard Egan, E’61, H’95 (see related story, page 5).

“The employees and the company as a whole are so connected to Northeastern,” says Joseph Mulloy, a computer engineering major who has had two 6-month co-ops at EMC. “They really understand the co-op program.”

Today, co-op students and Northeastern grads work side by side at companies in the Boston area, and at companies thousands of miles away. These simpatico professional relationships come with a host of benefits.

The co-op students get built-in mentors who can help them network with company colleagues. They report to supervisors who are comfortable with handing them challenges.

And the employers? As Northeastern grads, they know all about the sound education—and sound experience—that co-op students bring to the table.

As a result, trust in these students’ abilities runs deep. Manuel Henriquez, BA’87, founder and CEO of Palo Alto–based venture-capital firm Hercules Technology Growth Capital, says co-op student Christopher Nolte was such a “seamless contributor” at his company that he almost forgot Nolte was a co-op student.

“At one point, I started to back off in my expectations of him,” recalls Henriquez. “I actually said, ‘Oh my God, Christopher, you’re only a co-op student!’ But he said to me, ‘Don’t ever back off again. Push me.’”

Having been on both sides of the fence, student and employer, Henriquez is well aware that Northeastern’s co-op program offers companies a clear competitive advantage. “You’re able to test potential employees in a real-world environment for six months,” he says.

“It’s a fantastic leveraging of resources.”

Andrea Cox, E’92, senior manager at GE Aviation in Lynn, Massachusetts, with mechanical engineering senior Kareem Ghobrial. Says Ghobrial of Cox, “She did a really good job of marketing me throughout GE.”

“This slingshots my potential”
In a time of record-setting unemployment, co-op students are grateful, they say, for the networking opportunities afforded by employers who are Northeastern grads.

Ghobrial first worked at General Electric in summer 2006, between his freshman and sophomore years, on an internship in the company’s energy division that he arranged on his own. When he returned to campus in the fall, he happened to meet Andrea Cox, E’92, a senior manager at GE Aviation, at a career information session. He told her about his internship, and his interest in a co-op at GE.

“That’s how I ended up working in her group from July to December 2007,” says Ghobrial, a Presidential Scholar and a participant in Northeastern’s selective Galante Engineering/MBA Program, through which he’s pursuing an MBA as well as an engineering bachelor’s degree.

At the end of that co-op—he worked as a component design engineer for the next generation of Blackhawk and Apache helicopter engines—Ghobrial stayed on as a part-time GE employee through June 2008. He then went on to a second co-op, also at GE Aviation. Now he’s on his third, at GE Capital, in Norwalk, Connecticut.

“I was able to have four very different experiences within the same company,” says Ghobrial. “This slingshots my potential to move up through the company.”

He adds, “I got to use Andrea’s network. She did a really good job of marketing me to other people throughout GE. I probably would not still be here if it weren’t for her guidance and her inspiration.”

Cox says helping Ghobrial explore various jobs within GE made sense—for the company as well as for him. “He’s probably the best co-op student we’ve ever had,” she says. “He’s smart, and he understands how to work with people both older than him and in his own age group with no issues. And he has drive.”

At IBM, Peter Lynt, BA’83, vice president of global business process delivery, believes his company has benefited from the presence of Northeastern co-op students, too. Of IBM’s nearly 400,000-strong workforce, about 460 are Northeastern graduates, he says.

One of those graduates, Jean Reuter, MBA’09—who took a full-time job at IBM as a project manager in September—started as a co-op student at IBM. In addition to her marketing responsibilities, Reuter has been instrumental in “reenergizing the IBM brand image” on the Northeastern campus, says Lynt, her supervisor.

During the late 1970s, IBM typically had several hundred Northeastern co-ops on staff. But, as the nation slid into a recession in the early 1980s, the numbers dropped, and “the ties to the university were diminished significantly,” Lynt reports.

Now he hopes to rekindle the connection. “It’s very valuable for college students as well as the corporation,” he says. “It allows us to have an understanding of what is being taught in the schools, how that feeds into the corporation’s goals, and, frankly, it gives us a chance to look at individuals we may want to hire after they graduate.”

To strengthen the Northeastern-IBM bond, Reuter put together a campus marketing campaign aimed at encouraging students to choose IBM when they pick a co-op job.

“An unfair advantage”
Many other companies have also benefited from connections between Northeastern graduates and co-op students.

International accounting and consulting firm Deloitte is a good example.

“Here at Deloitte, there’s a whole community of Northeastern alums and co-ops,” says Theresa Brockelman, PA’93, audit partner in Deloitte’s Boston office, who earned a dual MBA/master of science at Northeastern. “We all go to campus together to do recruiting.”

Fellow audit partner Gerry Powderly, PA’95, who also earned a dual MBA/master of science, mentions another connector.

“Deloitte has been involved in the Northeastern CEO Breakfast Forum, which we’ve sponsored for the past ten years,” he says.

“The breakfast really demonstrates Northeastern’s commitment to networking in a business setting,” Powderly says. “If younger professionals are going to network, they tend to start at the CEO Breakfast Forum.”

Jeffrey Bornstein, BA’89, chief financial officer at GE Commercial Finance, says GE employees who used to be Northeastern co-op students are effective on-campus recruiters for the company.

“It’s very powerful when we take a handful of former Northeastern students back to campus and have them talk to seniors in the business school or the finance club,” says Bornstein. “I can’t tell you how many times these folks have come back to the office and said, ‘These three people in the class behind me are incredibly talented, and we really need to make a run at them.’ Sometimes we even cold-call these students, instead of waiting for them to call us.”

Christian Follman (left), BA’07, worked on co-op at Hercules Technology Growth Capital with CEO Manuel Henriquez, BA’87. Now Follman is a full-fledged Hercules employee. He says he felt like he was “integrated into the group from the first day on.”

He adds, “The more [Northeastern people] you have in terms of numbers, and the greater the success of these individuals, the more the success kind of feeds on itself.”

Employers who hire Northeastern co-ops—especially employers who have graduated from Northeastern—know that, as Liberty Mutual’s Gary Gregg puts it, the university’s graduates start their professional lives with “a leg up” on the competition.

Gregg, PA’79, Liberty Mutual’s president of agency markets, says, “The university does a great job preparing its students for working in a professional business environment. Their skill set is on par with or better than co-ops or interns from other schools. They’re able to come in, acclimate themselves faster than typical students, and become productive faster.”

EMC’s DePatie agrees. “I think, personally, anyone who goes through co-op has an unfair advantage over those who don’t,” he says. “It’s so easy to differentiate those who have been on co-op from those who haven’t. Through co-op, we get access to extremely talented individuals who are excited, energetic, very agile, and adaptable, who come into the engineering ranks and get their hands dirty. Quite honestly, our bias is to go after the ones who have been on co-op.”

Mark Vachon, BA’82, president and CEO of GE Healthcare America, says Northeastern co-ops “are winning against their competitors most of the time” when it comes to gaining admission into the company’s financial management program, a competitive two-and-a-half-year program of work and study—a combo not unlike Northeastern’s co-op system—that grooms employees for financial work at GE.

Vachon adds, “Our organization realizes the value of the product called Northeastern.”

To encourage the “Huskies helping Huskies” mentality at workplaces around the world, a new effort, the Lead Dog program, has been inaugurated by the alumni relations office.

“There is a real desire on the part of many alumni to mentor Northeastern students,” explains Jack Moynihan, MPA’93, vice president of alumni relations and the Northeastern Fund. “The Lead Dog program provides an essential communications link that lets alumni deepen their connection with the university, interact more closely with fellow alumni, and connect with Northeastern students on co-op at their organizations.”

Some of the workplaces currently participating in the program include Brown Brothers Harriman, Massachusetts General Hospital, EMC, and John Hancock.

“I hold them accountable”
Co-op students who work alongside Northeastern grads get compensation, too—and not just from their paychecks. Because employers tend to value the Northeastern pedigree so highly, students are offered a wealth of experience during their six-month co-op stints.

Caruso and Carson, the Deloitte co-op students, use superlatives to describe their experience at the financial-services powerhouse. Caruso says she “absolutely fell in love” with her job. Carson calls his work “unbelievable.”

All this in spite of fifty- to fifty-five-hour workweeks.

“There was no busy work or downtime,” insists Caruso. “The people there made the eleven- or twelve-hour days doable. I liked their work ethic. And they were concerned with my learning as well as my getting my jobs done.”

“Really challenging” is how Carson characterizes working at Deloitte. “You go in with almost no idea what you’re going to do,” he says, “and leave feeling like you’re just as good as the first-years [the new full-time hires]. I ended up teaching other people how to do things. We gained so much knowledge in such a short time.”

CEO Henriquez says the Northeastern co-op students at Hercules Technology Growth Capital “are treated like they’re regular full-time employees. I hold them accountable. I expect them to be professional.”

Nolte—the young man Henriquez almost forgot was a co-op student—worked at Hercules from January to June 2009. He did extensive financial modeling and analyzed individual investment vehicles.

“He was evaluating somewhere on the order of three hundred to four hundred line items of specific cash flows,” says Henriquez. “He was beyond the deep end of the pool.”

“Probably my favorite part of the co-op was working with Manuel,” says Nolte of Henriquez. “He’s very good at what he does. And he puts great importance on the younger people in the company.”

Another former Hercules co-op student, Christian Follman, BA’07, now a full-fledged Hercules employee, says he felt like he was “integrated into the group from the first day on. It’s very collegial.”

“I like to test people’s abilities to see how far they can go,” explains Henriquez. “I truly encourage our co-op kids to take chances.”

He has high praise for Northeastern co-ops. “I compare these kids to kids from Stanford, Harvard, MIT, or UC Berkeley, and I’ll take a Northeastern kid any day of the week,” Henriquez says. “They’re not pretentious, and they’re hard-working.”

“It’s very helpful to talk to somebody who is very knowledgeable about the company,” says MBA student Amy Chau Pham of her co-op supervisor at IBM, Peter Lynt, BA’83, vice president of global business process delivery. “Being able to talk to Peter has really helped me understand the overall picture.”

“That would have been a three-step promotion for me”
Henriquez and other Northeastern grads often talk with students about the nuts and bolts of the co-op experience itself.

“I know how it feels to go through the co-op program,” says Henriquez, “how it feels to be ignored, or to be encouraged and supported.”

On the basis of his firsthand knowledge, Henriquez is convinced that giving co-op students real challenges is the way to go.

“We are supposed to be giving them the business experience they need to understand as they prepare to graduate, because the real world is harsh and tough,” he says.

Lynt says that during his own co-op stints at IBM, from 1979 through 1982, he was asked to work on intercompany accounting trans­actions, not an easy task “way back then.”

But that pales in comparison to the co-op assignments given to current students, he explains. One Northeastern co-op Lynt mentors—second-year MBA student Amy Chau Pham, who’s based in Somers, New York—works on capital planning for IBM’s global technology services group.

“That would have been a three-step promotion for me when I started,” says Lynt.

Over the course of Pham’s co-op, she and Lynt, who works in Raleigh, North Carolina, have had many phone conversations about her career aspirations. Sometimes, Lynt relates his own experiences or offers advice.

“It’s very helpful to talk to somebody who is very senior and very knowledgeable about the company,” says Pham. “Sometimes, when I have a very limited view about what I’m doing, being able to talk to Peter has really helped me understand the overall picture.”

Andrea Cox and Kareem Ghobrial like to talk shop about Northeastern professors and classes, and the campus.

Cox jokes, “Once when I was on campus, Kareem walked me around to some of the new buildings. I yelled at him because he gets to take classes in new buildings and I didn’t.”

She adds, “We get along very well.”

Ghobrial says he’s indebted to Cox for all her support. “If you were to point to one person as the reason why I’ve been with GE for as long as I have been, it would be her,” he says. “She has been one of my biggest advocates and motivators.”

The way Cox explains it, helping Ghobrial during his GE co-ops is a no-brainer.

“I saw somebody” she says, “whom I didn’t want GE to lose.”

Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.