Accelerated co-ops power industry-ready solutions for employers
The eye-opening moment for computer science graduate student Sarah Liu was when she heard that the Chrome extension project she had worked on was going to market.
“That was very, very exciting to hear,” Liu says. “It confirmed my interest in software development, but it also got me interested in how products can be distributed to people so that they have more of an impact.”
Liu is one of 30 graduate students on Northeastern University’s Vancouver campus to participate in the first year of BaseCamp Studio, a new program that offers experiential work experiences similar to co-ops — but in weeks, not months. The students were hired to work in seven different partner businesses.
She worked for eight weeks over the summer with Traction Complete, an embedded partner in the downtown Vancouver building on campus. On a team with five other students, she tackled a research question: How good is AI-generated customer data?
“There are side projects that need to be done to answer certain research questions, but that we have difficulty justifying spending time on,” says Ernesto Valdes, chief technology officer for Traction Complete. “What we wanted to understand is, is that data any good? Do the models hallucinate and just tell you a bunch of lies?”