Co-op student Tim Hendricks works a shift at TRW Koyo in Loudon County.

Cooperative Engineering offers students
real-life work experience

Tim Hendricks is several years younger than the typical employee at TRW Koyo in Vonore. He uses the Computer Aided Drafting system (CAD) on a daily basis in product engineering to update process sheets that go on the steering gears assembly line.

Hendricks is one of the 500 student workers in the Office of Cooperative Engineering and Professional Practice.

After graduation, Hendricks, a mechanical engineering major, hopes to continue working with product design in prototype cars.

Since 1926, the focus of cooperative engineering has been to enable students to find out what they want to do after college before they graduate.

Cooperative education is a structured educational strategy combining classroom learning with productive work experience in fields related to students' academic and career goals. About 300 corporate partners, including DuPont, Eastman Chemical and Saturn Corporation participate in the Office of Cooperative Education and Professional Practice (OCEPP) program.

Employers, in addition to offering job responsibilities, also offer competitive wages and supervision from trained professionals, as well as evaluation of the student's performance at the end of each work term.

Co-op engineers typically work full time for one semester and study full time for the next. Students may perform data analysis or "mirror" an engineer during the first assignment, said OCEPP program director Walter Odom.

"The second time at the work place, the student can see what he or she learned in the previous semester. The third time at work is a different cycle with advanced responsibilities. Subsequent assignments offer heightened exposures that are fast paced, and the student may participate in multiple projects," Odom added.

Co-op participants are registered students but receive no credit hours. Transcripts reflect that the students are involved with co-op engineering that particular semester. In order to be eligible to co-op, students must qualify with a minimum 2.5 grade point average, receive academic approval from a faculty adviser, comply with all regulations of the OCEPP and perform work at a designated company. Continuation with the employer is determined by output -- students must earn the invitation to return to each subsequent assignment.

Co-op director Walter Odom (center) talks with (l to r) co-op student Patrick Robinson; Jason Maxwell, Director of the YMCA's Urban Achievers Program; co-op student Stormi Pehrson; and Donna Worthy with the Black Achievers Program.

The OCEPP program at UT is the second oldest program in the South and is one of the top 15 traditional programs in the United States.

Corporate partners realize that students co-op for more reasons than to earn money. Steve Bender, who recruits both full-time employees and students from UT for Kimberly-Clark described co-op as "an educational experience to create an engineer, not just an employee." Kimberly-Clark received the 1998 Cooperative Engineering Employee Excellence Award.

Bender commented that, when he visits a university, he usually receives stacks of resumes. "I put the resumes in two piles: a work experience pile and a no work experience pile. The ones in the work experience pile are the ones I consider for jobs," said Bender.

Going in, Bender added, students are quickly put on projects and assigned a mentor. Students meet with mentors and work on assignments that may tie together different fields of engineering, after which formal training begins. Later, students may be assigned a variety of projects from processing equipment to manufacturing items. The objective is to learn the process of manufacturing as well as the product.

"Ideally, the student has to work three semesters to get staff and mill experience. Students work on single projects for eight months to a year in an office environment while preparing construction drawings and writing specifications for equipment and software development," Bender commented.

"Mill assignments typically deal with day to day issues in keeping machinery running at the optimum, including smaller projects completed within the mill. This approach connects the theoretical to the practical," Bender added.