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its momentum during COVID when a group of electrical engineering students from Cal Poly Pomona working on designing PCBs as an essential part of their program, toured the facility. It was a really fun tour that got us talk- ing about expanding our internship program. But how would we find potential interns? To start, we contacted the IPC Education Foundation, which sponsors university chap- ters. We thought that if these students were involved in a university chapter of IPC, they also would be interested in the electronics industry. IPC was more than happy to help. ey gave us a list of contacts, and we had a number of college students or new graduates who were interested in becoming interns. It's quite a process to screen interested can- didates. We looked at where they were at in their studies and tried to gauge their interest in our business. We then paid our interns, who took on responsibilities that our staff just didn't have the bandwidth for, like researching some of our equipment to get a deeper understand- ing of its capabilities. e interns reviewed existing equipment, as well as other equip- ment we hadn't even considered buying. ey did benchmarking and testing and ultimately, from their report that summer, helped us make some equipment purchase decisions. It's great for their resumé that their project work informed the company for capital equipment purchase decisions. Yes. Another student worked on kitting parts as part of a BOM, which is typically approached using different customer strategies they have given us via their data. If we have a BOM, then we must get it into our system, so this intern worked with a company that had created a cloud-based system for creating BOMs, lever- aging part availability we could see online. It made things much more efficient. Having interns has enabled us to have a labor force that can investigate and think creatively to achieve a better operational advantage. It has yielded very concrete results. What schools are you working with? is year, we worked with students from Penn State and UCLA for the soware devel- opment program. Last year, we stayed local to Orange County and worked with students from UC Ir vine and Cal Poly Pomona. One student was from the Midwest, but his fam- ily is in Ir vine. He was a freshman, and did a great job during his internship. Currently, we have interns from Penn State, Loyola Mar y- mount, and University of California, Ir vine to name a few. Did you get a lot of interest when you contacted IPC chapters? What was your screening process like? One of our younger GMs, who had graduated from college about 10 years earlier, did the screening. ere was a lot of siing through 42 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2025