Mechanical Engineering Co-ops Lead to 37-Year Career at General Electric
Paul Meyer, E’73, mechanical engineering, has led a successful and varied career, both in his 37 years at General Electric and in his time teaching at Clemson University. His co-ops allowed him to discover his ideal career path while teaching him baseline knowledge vital to his success.
In his first year at Northeastern, Paul Meyer, E’73, mechanical engineering, struggled academically compared to his peers. Growing up around his father, an employee at General Electric, and his brother, an electrical engineer, Meyer knew from a young age that he wanted to follow in their footsteps. However, his high school education did not cover math and sciences extensively, forcing him to play catchup in college.
Meyer found co-op to be a welcomed and needed break from academics. More importantly, co-op served as Meyer’s formal introduction to the industry, allowing him to gain experience in the field that guided him toward his postgraduate career.
“Before, I was doing summer jobs of working in restaurants or running elevators,” says Meyer. “Co-op was actually in the industry.”
Now retired, Meyer has over 37 years of work experience at General Electric, navigating various positions that expanded on the skills and practices he learned during co-op. He also taught machine design at Clemson University, a position that relied on the thorough knowledge he obtained from his work experience. For Meyer, co-op allowed him to learn through experience, giving him baseline knowledge that proved vital later in his career.
“I’ve realized working through my career and co-op that there is always something to learn,” says Meyer. “There are things to learn that you can apply to your career later on.”
Meyer’s first co-op was in the quality control engineering at the GE location in his hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Coincidentally, it was in the same department his father worked in for 25 years. “All the people I was working with knew my dad, and they would tell me different stories about what he did,” he says. “It was interesting to see what he would do through his eyes.”
As part of the quality control group, Meyer was tasked with resolving manufacturing issues on the shop floor. Having his father as a mutual connection allowed Meyer to grow closer with the people in his department, who gave him jobs outside his job description to broaden his experiences. “They wanted to give me a good experience, and so they gave me a lot of leeway,” he says.
Although Meyer had positive experiences working at GE, he realized partway through his co-op that he wanted to work in a more creatively and technically stimulating role in the future. When GE announced they were not rehiring co-ops for the following term, Meyer used the opportunity to take on a role as a facility engineer at IBM.
As part of a team that designed laboratories for developing computer chips, Meyer was exposed to various drafting processes and learned how to calculate estimates of how much his designs would cost. His experience with HVAC through his time as a facility engineer assisted him in a course he took in a later term on heat transfer, which allowed him to excel in his studies. IBM also exposed him to work with acoustics, a process he quickly fell in love with and became vital to assignments later in his career.
Meyer took a job as an apprentice toolmaker at IBM for his next co-op. Almost immediately, Meyer realized he had found a role with the technical interaction he had been looking for all this time. “Right when they first put me on a Bridgeport Milling Machine, I realized how great it was to make things with my own hands,” he says.
The apprentice toolmaker position gave Meyer hands-on experience with a variety of machines, allowing him to understand their processes and capabilities. Working with metals taught Meyer precision measuring and tolerancing, which would prove vital to his later positions.
His final co-op was at Draper Labs, where Meyer helped design a guidance system for the Trident missiles. His exposure to tolerancing at IBM was important to his work in Draper Labs, where measurements were often taken to the millionth of an inch. Meyer also drew on his acoustics knowledge as a facility engineer when he conducted a lump mass vibration analysis on the guidance gimbal system.
The connections Meyer formed with his managers at Draper Labs eventually helped him secure a full-time position. After struggling to find a mechanical engineering role before graduating, including at Draper Labs, Meyer’s former boss used his connections to set up an interview for Meyer at GE, Pittsfield. Meyer received offers from four different programs after his interview, an opportunity he credits to his connections at Draper Labs.
“That connection through my manager with the people up in Pittsfield was a foot in the door,” Meyer says. “They made that happen for me.”
Meyer worked in multiple positions during his 37 years at GE, each drawing on different experiences from his previous co-ops. While working on the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle transmission, Meyer relied on his knowledge of tolerance to minimize early transmission failures and increase the vehicle’s lifespan. During the assembly of the turbine/generator sets for the Seawolf-class submarine, Meyer used his acoustics background to reduce the noise of the turbines and make the submarine stealthier.
GE allowed Meyer to work on different projects throughout his employment in numerous locations nationwide. “I’ve always had a mix of different applications, and I loved having that,” Meyer says. Through GE’s three-year advanced course, later the Edison program, Meyer received his master’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which he says opened the doors for him to take on new responsibilities.
Towards the end of his employment, Meyer took on a role leading the advanced course at GE, eventually leading him to grow the Edison program into a global program with over 200 students. When Meyer retired from GE, he took a position teaching machine design at Clemson University. Both positions allowed him to uplift young engineers by instilling the knowledge he had obtained throughout his career, extending back to his co-ops.
“I was able to use a lot of what I had learned along the way to help these students in their careers,” Meyer says. “It allowed me to take my knowledge and give back.”