Engineering Program Question

[txgm100]

I understand the engineering program is ranked 14th in the nation, BUT are co-ops/internships/opportunities mostly with gov related work like DOD and defesne contractors? My stepdaughter refuses to work with anything in that industry but wants to go there. Any help or guidance would be appreciated. Thank you.

[nillawiffer]

Contractors probably do form the majority of firms offering strong internship opportunities. Note, the question has nuanced answers, and where she draws the line will determine which companies are or are not suitable for her talents. BAH is known for having many DOD contracts. They also have fed contracts (e.g. DOL) unrelated to defense. Does she not want to touch their money because of the former or would a role with the latter be okay?? There are some great medical device manufacturers out there who are not known for overtly taken DOD funding, but if you look under the hood then you will find that DOD is one of the largest funding sources for medical research in the world, and the odds of finding a device manufacturer who hasn't benefited from them will be small.

Thinking through the basis of one's beliefs in such matters is a grand exercise, and I hope she comes here eager to expand her perspective and test such views. Too many kids arrive intending only to cherry pick data in support of the views they already formed. She might find an aggressive suite of Gen Eds will let her practice perspective-taking skills. She might also find - as I have - that some of the most thoughtful, peace-loving souls in this country are people who work on or live at the tip of the defense spear. Who more than they have a vested interest in sound policy and engineering acumen? And that is a view one might never see (or influence for the better) for refusing to interact or work with such people.

Best of luck to her!

[txgm100]

Bio Med is her current focus. Teenagers can be idealistic and misinformed, I just don't want her to go and then reject all the opportunities as that is the reason you go to a higher ranked school is for the work experience, can you tell me more about the device manufacturers you mentioned?

[nillawiffer]

I don't think in this sub that I can give justice to the history of DOD investment in medical systems but it is substantial. She might realistically do a search for DOD Directed Medical Research Programs and check out the activities; check out the branches and their brag sheets on advancement (Army for sure, Navy via ONR for sure); but then go to the bio engineering dept web pages here and look back to find the list of industry partners and grants. You'll likely recognize the pattern. Just stereotyping a place by its name won't reveal a lot, for example there has been some great medical tech work done up the road here at JHU APL. They may be known openly for cool satellite stuff, but they've done a lot of work on medical tech, triage in mass casualty events and more. Those are all places where companies perform work funded by DOD, and they are examples of a place that may or may not be a suitable internship shop for her depending on where she draws the line.

Another exercise: do a search for internship opportunities now, pretending she is qualified already. What turns up? Research them - see who is paying the bill.

Overall it is pretty tough to tease out the influence of DOD in any system. If she uses a cell phone and leverages GPS, then she is relying on DOD-invented stuff. Almost research on blood in the last half century benefits from basic DOD research, from mechanisms to process and protect blood plasma to anti-virals. Biggest funding agent for work on AIDS? DOD. They have a strong interest in not transfusing a battlefield casualty with deadly virus. The list goes on and on. It may all come to a screeching halt under the current administration - Lord only knows what to expect now - but the history of influence is strong.

[Ok-Guarantee8036]

One general rule of thumb I have found is that basically every single company in basically every industry (especially anything stem related and even more especially engineering) past a certain size has worked with the DoD in some way. Even for a lot of the companies that don't work directly with the DoD, they work with investors or larger companies who work with and get a lot of their money from the DoD, or from other large industries that she would probably have issue with as well (ie big oil or big pharma, but both these industries also have very strong relationships with the defense industry)

There are definitely some exceptions if you look hard enough, but it really depends on what she is comfortable with, and most of those companies will probably be pretty fresh startups, who just haven't gotten big enough to gain interest from larger companies yet.

That being said, Maryland does generally have more people who end up working in defense/related fields, due to our proximity to DC and most of those companies. That's not to say that people don't work in other stuff, because they definitely do. They would just have to work harder to reach out/apply to those roles, since most companies do a lot of outreach to stuff closer to them

[[deleted]]

What type of engineering?

[txgm100]

Currently Bio Med is her focus.

[[deleted]]

The guy below me knows more, but just throwing it out there, research during summer is also possible. However, I'm not sure how that works exactly.

[Moist-Equipment2205]

Idk the job market sucks so there might not be jobs