Have you ever wondered how a co-op at a large tech company can differ from a co-op at a start-up company? Are you curious about the interview processes for different tech companies? Our panelists are here to answer your questions and give you tips on how to obtain your dream co-op!

Panelists

Bilal Shaikh: My coop was in PULSE Lifesavings a startup that was based in McMaster's Forge incubator as an Augmented reality software engineering intern where I worked with them to create a part of their MVP for an AR CPR training program for Microsoft's Hololens 2.

Fuad Ali - I have completed 7 co-ops including companies such as Tesla, Twitter, and CIA

Tasmiha Hassan - My 16 month internship at a smaller but established company allowed me to take ownership of multiple projects and do everything from database management to full stack development to documentation and requirements gathering. It felt great to be trusted and assigned the same projects as my full-time colleagues

Ana Han -  I'm Ana, a 2nd year who is an incoming intern at Microsoft. I'm interested in artificial intelligence and bioinformatics, and one day hope to get involved in the health technology industry. Let me know if you have any questions about co-op hunting, biotech, or anything!

Alexander Austin - Most recently I was an Embedded Firmware Engineer at CleanSlate UV. An awesome Toronto startup that sanitizes phones using UVC light. I was responsible for the systems that ran the machine and worked on adding new features, and testing. Before that, I worked for 16 months at AMD as USB Validation Engineer. My role there was to confirm that the USB on new platforms released by AMD was up to the USB spec. 

Salman Khalid - Currently in 4th year of Electrical Engineering at McMaster University and completed my first co-op at McMaster Automotive Resource Centre as a Research Assistant on a EV Powertrain systems project. Following that, I did 8 months at Ontario Power Generation, Darlington Nuclear Station as Project Controls.  My next co-op this January 2021 is at University of New Brunswick, working to develop EV Control Systems models for a driver assistant AI.

Akil Hamilton - Akil is a third year software engineering student at McMaster University. He has done 5 coops so far: Telus, Slack, Facebook and Google.