These grad students found a pipeline to their ‘dream’ jobs
Northeastern students in Vancouver benefit from embedded business partners that offer research and employment opportunities.
After finishing her master’s degree at Northeastern University’s Vancouver campus, Lexi Liu never applied for a job.
However, she seamlessly transitioned from student to full-time software engineer, all within the same downtown building.
A gleaming, 25-story high-rise that resembles unevenly stacked glass boxes, Northeastern University’s Vancouver campus is home to classrooms, but also to an entire floor of businesses that provide mentorship, internships and research opportunities to students. In some cases, these embedded industry partners hire graduates, creating seamless transitions into the job market.
“I dreamed about it before I started,” Liu says of the job offer she received from the software company Highspot after her internship. “But I didn’t expect it to happen so smoothly.”
More than 60 businesses work out of the campus building’s second floor, occupying desks and conference rooms as little as one to three days a week and exchanging their availability to students for rent in Vancouver’s pricey downtown core.
One way that partners engage with students is through capstone projects. Usually completed in a master’s degree student’s final year, these projects focus on applied research. The projects are usually completed by a group of students, and the ideas sometimes come from embedded industry partners.
Vancouver-based Wisr.AI, which develops cybersecurity assessment and safety tools, uses office space on the second floor and has engaged Northeastern capstone students to tackle research questions. Last year, the company asked a group of students to analyze a public dataset of companies with known security vulnerabilities to look for patterns, Wisr.AI CEO Rob Goehring said.
The work was so well done, Goehring said, that the company hired one of the students.
Dhaval Jariwala was one of the first students to receive his master’s degree in data analytics engineering from Northeastern’s campus in downtown Vancouver in 2024. Today, he is a data analyst for Wisr.AI, returning to the campus building two or three times a week to work on the second floor.
“Dhaval definitely rose above the other students in terms of his capability, but also how quickly he understood the problem,” Goehring says. “He had the skills to join us and start doing some programming right away.”
Working on the capstone project piqued Jariwala’s interest in cybersecurity. He attended events hosted by the AI Network of BC, where Goehring is executive director, and the two began conversing about opportunities. That led to a three-month contract position and then to a full-time job.
His work at the startup includes building machine learning models and research. But his role is mostly data analysis.
“This is where I got to apply what I know,” he says. “It’s close to real-world problems.”
The fact that Goehring and other embedded partners are present on the second floor makes it easier for students and businesses to connect, says Ildar Akhmetov, Northeastern associate teaching professor of computer science.
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“The first stage of every capstone project is the students and the partner building a relationship,” he says. “If they’re in the same building first, it’s just more natural.”
Akhmetov, whose office is also on the second floor, also chats with partners that share the floor. When he hears about an opportunity for students to work with a partner, he passes it along.
That’s how Lexi Liu heard about the internship at Highspot. A student in the Align Master’s in Computer Science program with no experience working in the field, Liu wasn’t positive she even wanted to be a software engineer. She heard about the internship opportunity in class and decided to apply.
After four months as an intern, she was not only a confident software engineer, she was a full-time employee. Just a few weeks into her internship, her manager told her he liked her work and hoped to find a permanent position for her on the team.
“I wasn’t even thinking about a job, because I was just grateful for this internship,” Liu says. “But it was the internship that made me feel very interested in becoming an engineer.”
As an intern, she worked on the event-based learning team to update the event platform’s user experience. Today, she works on the agent platform team, helping to consolidate AI agents that help sales representatives learn new skills.
In the meantime, Highspot grew out of the workspace on the second floor and moved to a larger office in downtown Vancouver. But Liu still remembers being a student and seeing the embedded partners working on campus.
“Before I got my internship, I would look at those people and wonder, ‘What are they working on?’” she says. “And, ‘What would it take to be one of them?’”
