Covidien : Expands Internship Program, And With It, Engineering Hiring Pipeline

6:36 p.m. EDT , July 23, 2014

NORTH HAVEN - Nine years ago, Covidien hired fewer than 10 interns in Connecticut, though the multinational medical device maker has a major plant and engineering operation in the state.

For each of the past several years, between its North Haven and New Haven offices, Covidien has employed more than 70 interns.

The seven-fold growth happened over the same time that overall Covidien employment in the state fluctuated between 3,100 and 3,400.

The company, which develops and manufacturers surgical staplers, meshes and sutures and staples in Connecticut, mostly hires early-career or fresh graduates for its engineering staff.

.An extensive engineering internship program, then, is a natural move, but it took a nudge from the Connecticut Business and Industry Association to get the company on that path.

Heidi Giaccone, a senior recruiter at Covidien, said that in the first three years of the internship program, there were just a handful of hires. Then, in 2006, the company had 32 interns, with 75 percent of the salaries covered by a CBIA grant.

Once the program reached that critical mass, word spread among managers, and teams that had never had an intern started asking for them.

Now, after 11 years, Covidien has spent more than $3.5 million on salaries for more than 500 interns, and has hired 83 of them in permanent jobs after graduation. Undergraduates are paid between $16 and $20 an hour, depending on their experience, and MBA interns are paid more.

Merryl Reese, director of human resources in New Haven, said the company has a "targeted strategy to increase the hiring rates."

About 75 percent of the interns either grew up in Connecticut or attend school in the state, and that makes them better retention bets. About two-thirds are engineers, with others in quality, marketing, communications, finance and legal departments.

Megan Powell, a rising junior at UConn in biomedical engineering, first became an intern at Covidien after her senior year in high school in Guilford.

"I find with biomedical engineering, the number of companies in Connecticut is limited," she said. But she doesn't keep working there just because Covidien is the largest medical device maker in the state. She said after her first summer, "I realized how much I liked the company."

Powell was able to get in so early because her father is an engineer at Pratt & Whitney, and he knows an engineer who works at Covidien.

About 40 percent of the interns were with the company in previous years, Giaccone estimated.

Ron Fiume, a rising senior at Keene State College in New Hampshire, is in his first professional experience this summer. Fiume, who grew up in Madison and has an apartment in New Hampshire, said he was open to working in either place.

Fiume is majoring in occupational safety and health applied sciences, a choice he made after he saw some acquaintances struggling to find career-track jobs after graduation. "I felt it was a smart major to get into. You're always going to need a safety professional," he said. He's working in what's called divisional safety, which designs future processes with an eye to worker safety.

Kelly Valentine didn't do her first internship until just after she graduated from UConn in December 2009 with a biomedical engineering degree. At the time, she wasn't sure whether she wanted to go for a Ph.D. or go into industry. She started at Covidien in January 2010 as an intern and was offered a staff position that spring in testing, the same division where she interned. "I liked Covidien. I wanted to stay, and I did," she said.

A year later, she moved to new product development, a team of 40 engineers, where she helped design the first power surgical stapler. At the time, she was the only woman in the whole group, she said. She estimated that half the engineering interns are women.

New Jersey resident Nicole Piscopo, a rising senior at UConn in biomedical engineering, is also in her first internship.

She knew it was her goal after graduation to go into industry rather than become a pure researcher, so she wanted exposure to the work world.

Piscopo intends to start a master's degree immediately after graduation, with a specialty in tissue engineering. That's an experimental field, where she'd be likely to work for a small biotech firm.

She said this internship, which marries work in the lab with data analysis, "was what I hoped it would be, and I'm really happy with what it has been."

Piscopo, who is works in a surgical mesh program, took the lead in organizing a tour for the incoming freshman class at UConn of biomedical engineering majors. When Piscopo was a rising freshman, she said, she went on a tour with all the engineering majors, which made stops at Pratt, Unilever, Sikorsky and Electric Boat - none of which need biomedical engineers.