SEAS students spend their summer with local startups

By Elizabeth Egan 

SEAS undergraduate and graduate students participated in internships at local companies with funding from the Strategic Partnership for Industrial Resurgence (SPIR). This program was administered by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the University at Buffalo’s Center for Industrial Effectiveness (TCIE) that helps to connect external business and industry partners with talented students from UB

Through this program, Caitlin Hoekstra, director of career development and experiential learning for SEAS, worked with TCIE to connect students with seven local companies, where they worked from May to August.

Keerthi Priya Borra, working towards her master’s degree in data science, and Peter Vaiciulis, a senior computer science major, spent their summers with Trusted Nurse Staffing, a travel nurse staffing agency. They worked on a team with the chief technology officer, David Bachowski, who graduated from UB with his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

Borra worked on developing a system to help people compare the hourly rate of different health care jobs and provide job recommendations to health care professionals in a similar way to how Netflix recommends content to users. Vaiciulis spent his time designing and implementing a pipeline to be used for analysis of website interaction data and worked on creating website screens for a new unit that will focus on hiring travel doctors.

“I want to go into software engineering, so this internship was extremely valuable as it aligned with what I want to do after graduating,” said Vaiciulis. “It was really great to have the dual experience for the full stack web development and data engineering, which was a new area for me.”

Borra said the short experience was a memorable one.

“I have always wanted to work in data science in a way that helps a business to make data-specific decisions. This internship gave me a peek into what that will look like,” said Borra, who also noted that she enjoyed Taco Tuesdays with her team.

Parham Rohani, the CEO and co-founder of NanoHydroChem and a UB alum who earned his PhD in chemical engineering, utilized the SPIR program to hire PhD student Adam Raszewski as a full-time intern for the summer. Raszewski, who is studying chemical engineering at UB, will continue to work at the battery materials startup part-time while he completes his PhD.

Raszewski spent the summer testing coin cell batteries. A typical day included synthesizing anode battery materials or constructing electrodes to be used for the batteries.

“My favorite part of the position was learning all the steps in how batteries are created and actively participating in constructing them,” said Raszewski.

Raszewski noted that his doctorate program concerns battery material synthesis for direct fuel cell applications, making the internship at NanoHydroChem a great way to fully utilize the skills he has gained through his program. After conferring his PhD next year, he hopes to continue working in the battery research and manufacturing field.

Bachowski said that over the three-month internship, he observed Borra and Vaiciulis growing in their ability to work on a team and learning the importance of asking questions early. He added that while internships are beneficial for students, explaining to the interns why and how they do certain things can be beneficial to the company, helping them to evaluate their operations and identify areas where the team is lacking or assuming knowledge.

Vaiciulis will spend the fall semester of his senior year in a software engineering internship at Amazon Web Services.

“In this next internship, I will be building the tools for web stack development that I was using at this internship, so it will really be a great continuation of this experience,” said Vaiciulis.