A History of Interns

HydroComp Web Log

[efficiency in motion for over 20 years]

A History of Interns
Miscellaneous Musings from the Technical Director

Wednesday, 14-MAR-2007 by Donald MacPherson - Technical Director

I was recently looking over some of the administrative project planning documents from years past, and I saw names of the young people that have passed through our office as interns. I believe that we hired our first university intern fifteen years ago. Then a senior at Webb Institute, Bill Cook eventually hired on with us as a full time Project Engineer. He spent some three years with us, focusing on our work for Team Dennis Conner and the early days of PropCad, for example, and subsequently has gone on to great things in a variety of settings.

Our technical interns will work on virtually everything that goes on at HydroComp, from software coding to consulting services to R&D projects - but we don't just bring in engineering interns. We have provided a business marketing internship for nearly as long. Our business interns work closely with Jill Aaron, our Managing Director, and have done some remarkable work. Audra Hicks, our first business intern from the College of William & Mary, has made a name for herself in marketing and creative development for broadcast media.

So far, we have hired almost forty interns from a variety of schools - such as Webb Institute, William & Mary, University of Maryland, and of course, the University of New Hampshire. We have had the good fortune to find some of the best and brightest young people for our internships, and in many cases, we are able to create a full time position for them on graduation. Our current full time staff all started as university interns, and we are especially proud of Stephanie McArdle, who has risen from business intern to manage a large part of our overseas customer services. In fact, all of our new hires in recent memory have come from the ranks of our university interns.

Both myself and Jill Aaron, our Managing Director, participated in internships while in college, and this probably laid the foundation of HydroComp's belief that it is simply good business to give back to the broader community by helping a few motivated students along their way. Our internship programs have proven to be a great way to attract high-quality creative people, to create an employment opportunity for aspiring students, and to maintain our close relationship with the academic setting. If you don't have an internship program of your own, you don't know what you are missing.