A Sampling of UC Co-op Achievements

UC

co-op

students are tightly woven into the operations and achievements of thousands of organizations.  Co-op and the experience it provides land students in some of the most unlikely spots: Like underwater helping NASA to train astronauts; in Switzerland helping an oil-spewing plane to land; with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Three Mile Island investigation; helping to design better luge equipment for U.S. Olympic teams; on the Disney Productions design team, creating an amusement park for Tokyo; and helping to design the tallest skyscraper in Beijing. 

Other co-op achievements:

In the middle of a war
Aerospace co-op Damian Olivieri conducted vulnerability tests of “Warthog” A-10 aircraft and accelerated production of fuses for the “Hellfire” anti-tank missiles during the first Gulf War.  His analysis of foreign military aircraft was so important that Olivieri found himself on the phone talking to military personnel on the ground in Europe and the Middle East.

A Federal case
Look at the Federal Express name.

See the arrow created by the negative space between the capital “E” and the “x” of Express?  Co-opping student John Lutz created that logo concept in 1994, and it was adopted by the company later that year.

Quite fitting fashion co-ops
Fashion student Maren Hartman co-opped with the HBO series Sex & The City in the spring of 2002 and later for design houses that clothe music, film and television celebrities.  She helped design garments worn by singers like Brittany Spears, Puff Daddy, Blu Cantrell and Eve on MTV, during awards ceremonies and for magazine shoots. 

Counting down to blast off
Aerospace's Jeannette Dehmer had a California co-op with Lockheed Martin that was a dream come true: checking up on Albert Einstein’s work by helping to launch a historic space mission, Gravity Probe-B, that launched in 2004 after 40 years of preparation. Gravity Probe-B allowed scientists to measure how space and time are warped by Earth’s presence, and Dehmer remained on co-op for an entire academic year to help prepare and test the satellite for its launch.

"...someone's life may depend on it."
On her first hospital co-op in 2003, nursing student Shannon Walker literally saved a life

when she wondered about giving a cardiac/pneumonia patient a drug that was closely related to penicillin.  Already having learned that her patient was allergic to penicillin, Walker ran to her drug-reference guide and found she was right: The related drug about to be administered to the patient would cause the same allergic reaction as would penicillin.  How serious would that have been?  “It could have killed her,” explained Walker.

She knows the score
During summer 2003, business co-op Shelby Shenkelman worked with the Association

of Tennis Professionals (ATP), where she met the world’s top tennis players, competitors like Todd Martin.  Updating match scores on the ATP Web site and reviewing pension plans for retiring players like Pete Sampras had great perks: 

“During one tournament, Todd Martin walked in and said, ‘Hi, I’m Todd Martin.’  I was thinking, ‘You’re one of the world’s top tennis players.  I know who you are.’” 

The farthest from home
The farthest from UC anyone’s ever co-opped is Auroville, India. 

In late 2003,

architecture

student Logan Allen helped develop ways to use compressed-earth building materials for modern earthquake-resistant construction.

Creating designs to bowl them over
Work by graphic design co-op Travis Lee was seen around the world in one day during the Super Bowl of 2005.  Lee helped design the stadium and city signs, banners, logos and other art all related to the sports event, all of which were seen

on television throughout coverage of the game.

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