About the company:
Advisory Aerospace OSC started as a boutique management consulting firm for the Aerospace industry. In the last 3 years, it has transformed itself into a digital technology firm providing software products and services to improve factories for its Aerospace and Private Equity clients. They now plan to help manufacturers in other markets like MedTech and Industrials as well. Since 2018, this Minnetonka-based small business has hired STEM college students through the SciTech Internship Program to help them with extra client projects over the summer months.

“Any firm will tell you, getting to work with people, and them getting the experience of working with you, allows us to see if they’re a good fit,” explained Vivek Saxena, Advisory’s Managing Director. Several of their interns have fit so well in fact that they stayed on with the company fulltime after graduation. This includes Elliott Higgins, who interned with the company last year and is now an Associate. Higgins got the chance to work closely with this summer’s interns, even leading one of them on her data project.

“Having people like Elliott, they’ve been good coaches,” Saxena said. “He’s been here six months longer, which is a lifetime for our company. Elliott is coaching them and pretty soon, they’ll be coaching others.”

Meet the Students:
Sara Malinowski is an industrial engineering major at the University of Minnesota. She worked with Higgins, “transforming” data from what Advisory has to what the client will interact with, and recently built upon that for a front-end project. She’s also helping develop a data analytics tool for one of Advisory’s clients.

The longest serving employee, William Marrujo, was also a SciTech intern in 2018 while at Purdue and Tiati Thelen joined as a Co-op this year while pursuing an MS in Data Science at Mankato.

When Katelyn Tasto, a computer science major from the U of M, interviewed with Advisory, she knew from the start that this was a company she wanted to be a part of.

“I left the second interview thinking, ‘Oh gosh, I hope I get this! Because all these people seem really cool and nice, and I’d love to work with them,’” Tasto recalled.

During her internship, Tasto mainly worked with software and helped with an infrastructure project, writing functions and graphs and then organizing them into an easy-to-access library.

“I was surprised by the variety of things I got to help with,” Tasto said. “I think it’s mostly because the team is so small, but I’ve gotten to work on all these different projects. I’ve gotten to be in the meetings where we’re actually designing the software. Getting to be a part of those decision-making meetings has been really cool, and I don’t think it’s an experience I would have got at a larger company.”

A big part of what’s made this such a positive learning experience was the positive company culture that Saxena and his team have established.

“It’s incredible that the team here is so productive but at the same time, we’re still able to have fun,” Malinowski said, “I think that’s an incredible environment to have developed. It’s really unique, which is why I love every single person that I work with here.”

Out of every job I’ve ever had, this is by far my favorite,” Tasto agreed.

Get involved
Looking to build your small business workforce? SciTech’s new program year begins September 1st! Apply now and start planning your internship experience today.

Returning SciTech students can send their current transcript to scitechmn@mntech.org to reactivate their account for the 2022 program year.

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