Unique among cooperative programs, the Multiple Engineering Cooperative Program and the Civil Engineering Cooperative Program (MECOP and CECOP), currently used by multiple Oregon universities, demonstrates the power of an effective business/education partnership. The source of strength for these programs is the imaginative ideas they are founded upon: support by a voluntary annual assessment on member companies; insisting upon a high order of industry interaction with the university and its students; and continual improvement as the university adjusts its curriculum on recommendations made by the industry partners.
Make money on an Internship!
Students are selected into the program through two screening processes. First, they are screened academically after their sophomore year. This is primarily an effort to insure that students are academically qualified to take upper-division courses. A second screening takes place through an interview process during which all members of the Advisory Board interview the students applying for the program. The goal of this screening is to make every effort to insure that the students are qualified and ready for future internship placement.
Benefits
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Get local engineering Talent!
MECOP (est. 1978) functions as a collaboration between 4 Oregon universities and Oregon-based manufacturing companies that hire engineering graduates. Its purpose: to provide the highest level of engineering graduate, and bridge academic theory with industrial reality.
Benefits- Input into the university’s curriculum
- Improve industry-faculty relations
- Access to a pool of well-trained, potential employees
- Six-month preview of an individual without an obligation to hire
- Address issues or projects which full-time engineers may not have the time or skill to perform
- Inject enthusiasm and interest into the companies
- Develop or improve company’s ability to bring on new hires
- Bottom line: it’s a good business decision
Get more focused and motivated students!
MECOP is a unique internship alliance driven collaboratively by Oregon’s Engineering Universities (OSU, OT, PSU and UP), their respective student bodies, and Industry Partners.
Benefits- Industrial sites are an extension of laboratories that are not possible to maintain at the university
- Develop a bridge between the classroom and industry
- Support toward the development of programs and other issues facing education
- Network for faculty relations and research
- Returning interns are more motivated students
 Working as a process engineer intern for Tektronix, Inc. has been an incredible experience. In a broad sense, I assist in maintaining and improving the manufacturing flow for several of our main product lines. Most of my key projects reflect Tektronix™ relatively recent surge to transition into a completely lean manufacturing environment. Largely, this involves turning our traditional manufacturing lines into lean cells process centered around removing as much waste as possible in the forms of excess motion, inventory, transportation and more. As my projects wrap up, it is a great feeling to see something I've worked so hard on become a reality and to see how my decisions affect a ... Read more Hillary Shoop, Intern | |
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AOI Business Viewpoint 2011-01-03 Greg Elden
Oregon stands at a crossroads. Crushing unemployment lingers. The state faces multiple financial crises. Funding higher education continues to be a major challenge. And it’s all within a tax structure that many manufacturing concerns consider tough on business, if not flat-out anti-business. Even in that milieu, Oregon’s manufacturing industry is not only fighting for its life, it’s digging in and working to expand sales and yes, jobs. |
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Participating Universities
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History
Conceived in the summer of 1978, MECOP was to be a collaboration between OSU and Oregon-based manufacturing companies that hired engineering graduates.
Faced with a growing gap between the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in the work place and those being taught in universities, three major Oregon companies—Freightliner, Tektronix, and Bingham-Willamette (now Sulzer-Bingham)—entered into an agreement with OSU’s Department of Industrial Engineering to start the Manufacturing Engineering Cooperative Program. According to Mike Smith, a former Freightliner engineering manager and one of MECOP's founders, “the first MECOP companies recognized that universities had some limitations. We were willing to help OSU overcome those limitations and, at the same time, help ourselves. We needed young engineers who would graduate with more hands-on education than they were getting.” By combining forces, the new program would provide students with a working laboratory in which to apply the theories they learn in their classrooms.
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