Not sure if this should be in job-posting or somewhere else, but I’m interested in providing some sort of learning opportunity for students and/or budding automation enthusiasts. I’m not looking for free labor on this forum, but instead I wanted to ask the knowledge base (aka y’all) if anyone knows about any sort of programs in the greater Boston area that might be looking for sponsors/enrollment.
I know there’s a few Mass state programs that align prospective interns with companies - does anyone have experience with these programs or know of any alternatives? Colleges, internships, high-school programs, etc…
You’re not looking for a co-op right? It doesn’t sound like it but there are a lot of these programs where you get a college student for a semester. I haven’t had a bad co-op yet!
Unfortunately I don’t know of any other style programs. Northeastern also has a page on internships Learn About Internships | Employer Engagement and Career Design but it seems a bit out of date / not really helpful for someone that might be offering one.
Just keep in mind safety or legal when thinking about this sort of thing. Probably good to ask what would be needed to get an intern from a training / liability perspective. Highly dependent on the type of work you’re doing though.
I agree that we need better “training” and exposure to a wider set of ideas & skills from the jump (in SF this is why I am partnering with hardware & software groups) but there’s too many old school folks in labs right now. Hopefully that goes away soon.
Prior to the pandemic, I hosted job talks at several universities, many of which were alma maters of my fellow Hamilton field applications specialists. My intent wasn’t really to recruit, but to inform the undergraduates of the types of technologies and careers that one could have in this industry. I suspect many of you are like me and didn’t learn about laboratory automation until we were already in the industry so I felt it was important to provide some insight and guidance so that they can be better prepared and informed.
Many of these programs inquired about internships, so you may have some luck by simply reaching out to universities with biomedical engineering programs and offering to do a job talk and discuss internship possibilities. I tend to focus on biomedical engineering programs as it’s a good mix of science and programming and many require an internship or some sort of senior design project.
If you want some additional ideas for what kind of programs to investigate, I’d look into your area and see if there is a Professional Science Master’s Degree Program in your local area that caters to . I graduated from one, and it was extremely helpful in preparing me for future jobs. There was a heavy emphasis on industry focused topics with guest speakers, as well a requirement to do an full time internship for credit (where you could not take other classes so you could focus on it and get the most out of it) as well as many offerings of weekend modules (that counted for credit) that were geared towards in lab exposure to certain techniques (such as Illumina Library prep/sequencer prep).
If the university has a liquid handler, then I bet you could even work with the program to offer one of those weekend modules that would allow people to get their hands dirty with a physical robot as well.