SynQor Partnership Provides Career Opportunities for EE Students

September 21, 2021

The Electrical Engineering bachelor’s program at Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology boasts a 100% job placement rate, meaning every student has landed a full-time engineering role after graduation. Contributing to that overall success is an innovative partnership between the program and Boxborough-based SynQor Inc.

The partnership started in 2019, when SynQor’s Daniel Wang reached out to his mentor, Dr. Lisa Shatz, chair of BFIT’s Electrical Engineering (EE) program. Wang had just been promoted to Manager of Engineering in Production and was looking for recent EE graduates who might be a good fit for his new team.

Their discussion led to creation of a paid internship program that quickly became a talent pipeline for SynQor. To date, five BFIT students have worked as SynQor interns and three BFIT graduates have been hired into full-time engineering roles at the company, which supplies high-performance power conversion solutions to the military/aerospace, industrial, transportation, medical, and telecommunications markets.

“Hiring BFIT students is a major advantage for me because I know what they should know and what they might not know because I went through the exact same curriculum,” said Wang, who graduated from the EE bachelor’s program when it was housed at Suffolk University. The program and its faculty moved to BFIT in 2017. “For me as a manager, it just makes my life a lot easier. It’s a much easier training period with Dr. Shatz’s students.”

Liyakat Khalifa, BFIT Class of 2021, said his SynQor internship gave him invaluable hands-on experience—as well as a job offer before he graduated.

“I got to test systems on the bench and use automated systems and figure out what was failing and why,” said Khalifa, who is a now a manufacturing electrical engineer at SynQor. “It’s very cool to make a product that’s helping people in the real world. And what we learned in BFIT lab work was really helpful in my internship.”

BFIT students selected as SynQor interns spend 20-25 hours a week working in cutting-edge labs in the company’s Boxborough headquarters. Wang divides the internship into three phases, each designed to build the students’ skills and confidence and to expose them to as many parts of the business as possible. In phase one, interns may set up physical models that can be used for product testing. They work with senior engineers who teach them how to run a test, troubleshoot issues, and think like a design engineer. Phase two allows interns to take on their own small projects, such as seeing if they can diagnose and fix a production line failure issue. In phase three, interns are paired with a senior engineer to work on new product development.

“It’s definitely a very big, wide world of opportunities in electrical engineering,” Wang said. “I want students to come in and get experience on everything from the manufacturing side to the quality and reliability side, design, testing, automation, everything. We really encourage them to get their hands dirty and not be afraid to make mistakes. I always tell them that my job as a manager is to put them in a position to succeed.”

Nhat Nguyen, BFIT Class of 2020, said his BFIT studies prepared him well for the range of duties he tackled as an intern at SynQor. “The fundamentals of electrical engineering that BFIT’s program provided were very important, necessary, and helpful to me because I was able to apply what I learned in class during my internship,” said Nguyen, who was hired into a full-time engineering role at SynQor after his internship.

Wang said SynQor’s leadership team were quick to support the internship program, which is the only one of its kind at the company. “I’m building this pipeline and the company is very happy about it,” he said. “They like the results these kids are bringing in here.”

Shatz said the partnership offers BFIT students more than just real-world experience and a part-time paycheck. She said she hopes it also serves as inspiration for how to conduct their own future careers.

“Since Danny Wang is an alumnus of our program when it was at Suffolk, he knows how good the faculty are at gently encouraging our students toward excellence,” she said. “It’s so satisfying for faculty to see former students not only excel, but give so much back to current students. I’m sure many of our current students will carry this tradition forward as well.”

(Pictured (l to r) Liyakat Khalifa (BFIT Class of ’21), SynQor Manager of Engineering in Production Daniel Wang, and Nhat Nguyen (BFIT Class of ’20) in SynQor’s Boxborough headquarters.)

Learn more about the ABET-accredited Electrical Engineering bachelor’s degree program at BFIT.