Empowering Interns: Shaping Tomorrow's Tech

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Today, we widely accept that creating and leveraging opportunities to fill our future tech workforce is paramount to future success—both as individual companies and as an industry. This is even more true, and certainly more challenging, for in-person manufacturing jobs. In our conversation, Gerry Partida of Summit Interconnect focuses on the essential role of interns in the technological landscape and emphasizes how nurturing their skills and potential contributes significantly to the future of technology and business operations in our companies today.

A strong internship program enhances students' capabilities and confidence and ensures that the tech industry will continue to evolve through important new skills, fresh perspectives, and dynamic solutions. Interns gain real-world experience that encourages innovative thinking, preparing them to tackle future challenges and drive advancements wherever they land.

Marcy LaRont: How did the Summit internship program come about?

Gerry Partida: We began an internship program in the summer of 2018, but it actually got 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 talking about expanding our internship program. But how would we find potential interns?

To start, we contacted the IPC Education Foundation, which sponsors university chapters. 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. They 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 candidates. 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 understanding of its capabilities. The interns reviewed existing equipment, as well as other equipment we hadn’t even considered buying. They did benchmarking and testing and ultimately, from their report that summer, helped us make some equipment purchase decisions.

Continue reading this interview in the January 2025 issue of PCB007 Magazine.