Press Releases

It is a good summer for the interns at the City of Lake Oswego. That means better service for the citizens of Lake Oswego.The city staff is now bolstered by a record eight interns, and they are having an impact in much more important ways than making trips to the copying machine or making coffee.“The interns help us tremendously,” said Megan Phelan, director of human resources for the city of Lake Oswego. “They help projects get done that have been inadvertently neglected.” These interns are not only young, bright and promising, in some cases they are very well qualified, with past experience in area planning and engineering departments.

About 12 years ago, civil engineers in the Willamette Valley got together and worked with Oregon State University to expand a multidisciplinary internship program to include a strong civil engineering component. Civil engineers, particularly those in public agencies, typically have a different role than their counterparts in the mechanical, industrial, electrical and computer engineering fields. That initial effort led to the formation of CECOP, the civil engineering branch of MECOP (Multiple Engineering Cooperative Program). A board of volunteers, one from each company, oversees the program, the selection process and employment evaluation. The program started at OSU but now includes OIT and PSU engineering colleges.

If you looked in on Mike Sabo at Cascade Microtech's corporate headquarters in the Silicon Forest last summer, you couldn't have distinguished him from the firm's 20 full-fledged engineers. Just like them, he spent his days designing and testing precision equipment for many of the world's biggest microchip manufacturers. Only one small clue gave away his status as a student intern: the tower of textbooks teetering over his workstation.

Next month in Corvallis, Oregon’s top engineering students will go through what few outside the pro sports arena ever experience – a daylong series of interviews that ends with engineering companies drawing numbers for a shot at hiring their top picks for internships.

Intel continues to be a cornerstone of MECOP's engineering successes by annually employing up to 50 interns with the majority of Intel’s internship disciplines being electrical, mechanical, and computer engineering.

I’m an intern in the Engineering Construction department. I’ve been here since April of this year and will be heading back to Oregon State University at the end of this week.

This month's IT DriveLine focuses on the success of Freightliner's involvement in the MECOP internship program and on the ever-increasing efficiencies of the IT Data Center. It also introduces the Miscellaneous Invoicing program and brings us up to date on how the Help Desk's successes in meeting with its customer service goals.

Randall Hoyt, who graduated with a degree in civil engineering, was snapped up by a Wisconsin engineering firm before the interview process was even over. Hoyt says the reason he beat out all the competition is the experience he gained during his CECOP internship and his experience at OSU. Here is his story, in his own words.

97 percent of the Class of 2005 are satisfied with their skills, jobs and pay, but the costs come in higher tuition that leaves a heavier debt load

To start off we had selected Brandon differently than the normal process of Intern selection. Our company had just gone through some extensive reorganization and we had to change our Intern requirements at the last minute...

The Klamath Community Development Corporation (KCDC) and the Multiple Engineering Cooperate Program (MECOP) will receive Oregon Institute of Technology’s two 2005 Community Partnership Awards.

The benefits of a well-designed internship program may seem obvious: Students get industry experience, and companies get extra labor at reduced rates.

Most students come to college as works in progress, their interests only partially identified, their potential still to be realized. And as they explore and develop that potential, many students find something equally important: a mentor. OSU offers an “opportunity-rich environment” for mentoring; at the same time, it’s an informal and organic process, says Larry Roper, vice provost for student affairs.

As many of you may know, Oregon State University has run a well-organized summer internship job program for their Construction Engineering Management (CEM) students for a number of years. While the CEM intern program is still thriving at OSU, CEM students will soon have an additional opportunity to get real world work experience and help fund their education when the Multiple Engineering Cooperative Program (MECOP) at OSU creates a pilot project for CEM students in 2005.

Mechanical Engineering students Darren Johnson and David Elia pose with one of the cars they helped design and race to first- and third-place overall finishes at the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Mini-Baja West Competition in Portland, Oregon. Johnson, who graduated in June 2004, and Elia, a senior, say their paid internships working in industry will have a profound impact on their careers.

Engineering students have an opportunity to gain valuable experience in industry and take part in paid internships. The Multiple Engineering Cooperative Program is a five-year undergraduate program financed by industry. The program is training and development experience featuring internships with two different companies.

If you are like most engineers you still remember the fear, excitement, trepidation, and panic of your first real engineering job. But think what an advantage it would have been, if you had gotten your first experience as part of you college curriculum. As a result of a cooperative work experience program, that is just what is happening for a select group of civil engineering students at Oregon State University (OSU).

The Civil Engineering Cooperative Program (CECOP) is a joint partnership with area governmental agencies and consulting firms. This successful program has been in existence for over five years and is part of the much larger Multiple Engineering Cooperative Program (MECOP) that has provided meaningful work experience to engineering students in 13 different disciplines for 25 years. Currently, the CECOP program has 14 member companies and places 35-40 students each year out of the approximately 220 junior and seniors in Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Twenty five years ago, engineers from heavy truck builder Freightliner, electronics giant Tektronix, and pump manufacturer Bingham-Willamette (now Sulzer-Bingham), noticed a troubling trend. The three Oregon-based companies identified a growing gap between the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in the work place and those being taught at the state’s universities.

Twenty-five years ago a handful of Oregon companies forged a unique alliance to bring the state’s brightest engineering students to their workplaces for extended hands-on experiences that would benefit the companies as well as the students - and in the process keep Oregon’s top new engineering talent from leaving the state for employment elsewhere.

Engineering students have an opportunity to gain valuable experience in industry and take part in paid internships. The Multiple Engineering Cooperative Program is a five-year undergraduate program financed by industry. The program is training and development experience featuring internships with two different companies.

An Oregon State University internship program that has Pacific Northwest businesses chomping at the bit for its graduates is continuing to expand, and the concept holds potential to be applied at many other institutions and fields of study, officials say.

One hundred Oregon State University students are among the latest to be accepted into the Multiple Engineering Cooperative Program, or MECOP—one of the most innovative and successful internship programs ever developed between a university and private industry.

A sophisticated internship program for engineering students at Oregon State University is so successful it could become a model that changes the face of higher education, university officials say.