NASHUA – BAE interns celebrated their time with the company Thursday, delivering presentations before coming together to enjoy a barbecue beneath a white tent on the front lawn of BAE headquarters in Nashua.

“Today was the culmination for their summer project,” said Ray Brousseau, vice president and deputy general manager of electronics systems.

He said they bring in interns during the last week of May and first week of June, and about 200 of this year’s 300 interns were for the New Hampshire area, while the other 100 were for other sites. This program is very important to the company and occurs each year, officials said.

“They come in, we put them onto real projects and we sign them onto teams,” Brousseau said. “So, our interns don’t deliver coffee, they’re not doing dry cleaning, they’re active participants and active members of the real teams,” Brousseau said. “They bring value to the company right away. They’re filling needed roles, and we’re always amazed at how smart these kids are.”

Alex Chen was one of the interns participating in presentations Thursday and will soon be starting his freshman year at Yale University. While attending Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough, Massachusetts, he was involved with robotics, and said BAE has a big presence in the New England area and around New Hampshire with connection to first teams.

“I did first robotics all four years of my high school, and BAE has a big presence at first robotics, and so I was looking for things to do over the summer and I reached out to my mentor on my team,” Chen said. “He forwarded me an email from some BAE Systems contact with information on how to apply. So, I applied after my junior year, going into senior year of high school, and so now I’m back. I maintained the connections I made during that first summer and was able to reach out and reapply.”

As a second-year intern, and soon to be college student, Chen said the last day of his internship will be next Thursday, concluding his nine-week program.

“It’s been really valuable as far as both the collaborations aspects and teamwork,” Chen said. “So, the intern presentations we just had was a great way for me to meet other interns from other programs, make those connections and work on public speaking skills.”

He said the people he’s come in contact with at BAE have made his experience valuable, especially having the opportunity to work alongside experienced veterans in the industry, as well as learning from the other interns and their experiences.

Rachel Lia was another intern on site at BAE headquarters Thursday and she is majoring in mechanical engineering at Worcester Polytech Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. She said her time in the program has been nice, giving her a lot of experience and a better idea of what she could be doing once graduation rolls around.

“I’m working in the electronics warfare lab as a process engineering intern,” Lia said. “So, I get a little bit of a mix of what I get to do. I work with the process engineers and I do a lot of work with them. I also do floor support and I have some projects on my own where I do a lot of continuous improvements and value stream mapping, and that’s really just working on making things more efficient and helping things flow more smoothly throughout the factory.”

While both of these two interns are gaining real-world, hands-on experience in an in-demand field, others have been offered full-time careers with the company through their past internships, including Timothy Del Signore. He became a full-time employee in June 2016, one month after graduating college at Wentworth Institute of Technology.

“I was an intern back in 2015,” Del Signore said. “I was working here and then at our other Nashua facility, and I was working on Air Force programs at the time. This was my fourth internship as a student at Wentworth, and it was my last one before graduating, and before graduating I got a full-time offer here to start before I went back for my senior year … and the rest has been history.”

After receiving the job offer in August, schooling his way through senior year and then graduating in May, a month later he found himself clocking into work at BAE. As it is, some interns are leaving as early as today to return for school, bringing their newfound knowledge along with them. Brousseau said these internships allow these young adults to understand what their current chosen career field is all about.

“For us, it’s a vital pipeline to our next generation of talent,” Brousseau said.

Last year, BAE hired more than 1,000 new employees, and are set to hire ad additional 1,000 more this year. About 700 of those new hires will be working in the New Hampshire area, and looking toward the future, Brousseau said they are looking to hire another 1,000 next year. As it is, in their electronic systems sector, there are 14,000 employees, about 5,000 of which are in New Hampshire. He said some employees have been with the company 25 and 30-plus years, and that there’s a lot that people can do within the company including finance, engineering, communications and more.

Adam Urquhart can be reached at 594-1206 or aurquhart@nashuatelegraph.com.