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Benefits
Through three-month internships or class projects, our corporate partners gain access to skilled engineers who understand the impact of business decisions. MEM students and graduates can facilitate closing the gap between business and technology, and provide technical expertise for your organization's needs. Many summer internship corporate sponsors hire their MEM interns upon graduation.
Why hire a Dartmouth MEM?
MEM students and graduates know how to translate advanced technical and quantitative information across all areas of an organization. They add value as data analysts and product managers who can articulate the business implications. They understand technology and know how it can be leveraged and sold, and they have the business and interpersonal skills to steward a product, service, or experience through all aspects of its life cycle.
What can MEM students and graduates do for your company?
- Provide action-oriented insights through statistics and machine learning
- Translate customer needs into successful product designs
- Collaboratively manage technical projects and communicate clearly with clients and colleagues
- Identify bottlenecks, streamline operations, and add automation
- Analyze financial data and create sophisticated models
- Translate technical and quantitative information across all areas of an organization
How do we prepare MEM students for the business of technology?
- Graduate engineering courses at Thayer, a leader in team-based project work, are combined with core and elective business courses at Tuck, a top-ranked business school.
- All students complete a three-month internship with a corporate sponsor.
- Students either customize their own or choose an area of concentration or career track: data analytics, product management, entrepreneurship, healthcare systems, energy, or high-tech.
Partnership Options
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Sponsor an Internship
Corporate partners sponsor internships through the ENGG 390: MEM Project course. During their internship, students receive course credit while also helping their sponsor solve a real-world problem. Final deliverables may include defining a need and proposing a solution, describing appropriate analytical, experimental, and economic evaluations, and providing recommendations for further action. Projects normally have an industrial context or may be related to a specific design objective within a research program at Thayer.
Example projects:
- Develop a predictive analytics/forecast model and estimate future revenue streams based on learnings from existing data and considering multiple input parameters.
- Improve inefficiencies and optimize the production process associated with manufacturing a product that was encountering challenges with on-time delivery in a life sciences company.
- Create an end-to-end product roadmap for a new low-latency database storage solution for a communications technology company.
- Manage inventory variance by identifying the cause for the variance, performing an audit of that process, presenting findings to upper-management, and proposing solutions at a manufacturing company.
- Build a new platform for monitoring supplier quality for all global programs at an automotive company to ensure the timely qualification of the highest quality parts.
- Provide end-to-end data analysis on the current status of content consumption diversity and user engagement in different user segments for a popular social media app.
- Create automation, tracking, and monitoring tools to facilitate visibility in the customer acquisition pipeline, reduce bottlenecks within key operational procedures, and monitor company resources during daily operation at an energy company.
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Sponsor a Project for "Technology Assessment"
Teams of two to four students are matched with projects proposed by industry organizations that seek to address a business challenge or need.
ENGM 178: Technology Assessment
ENGM 178 projects involve analyzing two or more technology options against a set of technical and business requirements. There is no cost to the organization for the project. The ideal project is important but not urgent, and includes weekly one-hour meetings to give the students advice, keep them on track, and steer them away from dead ends. Projects are finalized with a case description by August 17.
Example projects:
- Investigate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology for identifying patients with undiagnosed medical conditions in healthcare settings.
- Assess the range of IoT technologies that can be incorporated into commercial high purity water systems to improve service delivery.
- Assess available technologies for cooling high-power electrical components used in computing and industrial applications.
- Study the state of the art in off-wire light rail vehicles and recommend a cost-effective, climate-friendly technology that is FRA compliant with respect to crashworthiness and minimizes adverse noise impacts to suburban environments.
- Assess the current state of spatial audio adoption across the signal chain for mobile (smartphone) based content consumption. Craft a hypothesis for how adoption will evolve over the next five years. Recommend what, if any, activities the company should undertake to maintain a premium, competitive position in the market.
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Sponsor a Project for "Platform Design, Management, and Strategy"
ENGM 190: Platform Design, Management, and Strategy
This class is taught in the Fall by Professor Geoff Parker, a recognized expert in platform companies, such as Amazon and AirBNB.
"A platform is a business based on enabling value-creating interactions between external producers and consumers. The platform provides an open, participative infrastructure for these interactions and sets governance conditions for them." —Geoff Parker interview in The Marketing Journal.
Example projects:
- Work with the leadership team to develop the company’s metaverse strategy, including evaluating metaverse vendor partners, key use cases, revenue streams, and network effects.
- For an existing platform company, explore unmet user needs for what other services could be integrated into the current platform and fit with the company’s vision. Determine how the company should manage the extended platform ecosystem and how any organizational gaps should be filled.
- Topics from the book Platform Revolution, including architecture and design, managing network effects, launch, monetization, open vs closed, competition and strategy, governance, strategy and competition, and policy and regulation.
- For brick-and-mortar companies, determine if a start-up platform would have any implications for your customers and explore a complementary platform business offering.
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Sponsor a Project for "Data Analytics Project Lab (DAPL)"
ENGM 204: Data Analytics Project Lab (DAPL)
This class is held in the Spring and shows students how data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence create value for organizations. The proliferation of IT-mediated economic activity generates an abundance of micro-level market data which has led to the competitive use of analytics, experimentation, and fact-based decision-making. Today, most organizations rely extensively on data analysis to predict outcomes and guide executive decision-making.
DAPL provides a great opportunity for students to work on a real question and gain access to talented engineers who understand business by matching student teams with a business challenge involving analytics and machine learning. Projects are sourced from both commercial and non-profit as well as government organizations. The ideal project has a reasonable chance of a valuable outcome for the company and a data set (at least 50,000) sufficient for training AI and ML models.
Example projects:
- Add real-time social media data to existing data assets; build a model to identify the likelihood that legislation would pass into law.
- Analyze price elasticities across complex consumer goods product lines to make pricing recommendations and focus offerings by eliminating unprofitable segments.
- Apply machine learning to expense forecasting for complex multi-billion-dollar division and significantly improve accuracy and demonstrated potential to dramatically reduce analyst labor.
Expectations
- Weekly one-hour meetings to give the students advice and keep them on track (Spending time with the students can also help with recruiting.)
- A small donation ($5,000 or less) to defray costs (not applicable to nonprofits and early startups)
- A realistic time-frame (Ideal projects are important, but not urgent for making this year's company objectives.)
Strengthening Customer Partnerships through Data
After the successful completion of their last collaborative project, SAP Business Challenge Network, Siemens Digital Logistics, and Dartmouth joined forces again for a second project in the field of data analytics.
Additional Opportunities
- Mentor students
- Network throughout the Thayer community
- Lead fireside chats and/or panel discussions
- Participate in a project review board
Next Steps
If you're interested in a partnership or other engagement opportunity, please submit a brief description of how you'd like to get involved.