Pirelli intern lands full-time post quickly
Internships a hallmark of international tire manufacturer
When Harshil Pandit graduated from Mercer University, he was able to land what he anticipated to be a six-month internship at the Pirelli North America plant in Rome. Just a month into that internship, he was offered, and accepted a full time job with the company.
“Pirelli has always believed in the potential of young people. For this reason, developing partnerships with local universities is fundamental for us to work with talented students that can then grow with the company,” said Michele Morris, HR director at Pirelli in Rome. “In the last months the Pirelli Rome factory has offered internships to four young students, all coming from local colleges, Kennesaw State University, Mercer University, the University of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, all with an engineering background.”
When Pandit completed his final exams to graduate, Mercer reached out to him indicating that there were a number of companies interested in meeting with some of the engineering graduates at the college in Macon.
“It was though that conference that I met Pirelli,” Pandit said.
His degree is in environmental engineering and he was able take the internship in the health and safety division.
“I hit the ground running because we had an audit coming up. Pirelli sent me for training for ISO audit for the environmental compliance,” Pandit said.
After completing that training in Atlanta, he assisted with the ISO audit and was given some freedom to choose a project that was environmentally related, Pandit said. He chose to collect data to look at how much water the plant was using, looking at environmental performance related to both water and air emissions and quality sampling.
“This was one in the span of one month that I was an intern,” Pandit said.
He said the company had a lot of pre-existing data about how much water Pirelli was taking in and how much waste water was being produced.
“We didn’t quite have an understanding of where does all the water go within the systems,” Pandit said, adding that he decided to install
water flow meters on some of the systems in the Rome plant to understand what system was using how much water. “Once we got that data I started looking at optimization of each step.”
“I was never expecting to get hired full-time as quickly as I did,” Pandit said. Now that he’s full-time, Pandit is utilizing the data to develop and implement new projects.
“The projects that come out of it are something that are universal to multiple plants. There are certain machines that I used here that are universal to all plants,” Pandit said. “Once we optimize systems here, we can take that data and compare it to our functions with our other facilities and see if they are optimizing the same way.”
Morris said the Rome plant is one of the most advanced within the company.
“We need highly skilled and specialized employees for our plant and, for this reason, we are working to enhance our relationships with local universities in order to expand our internship program,” said Morris.
Pandit said he encourages other college students to take advantage of every opportunity to meet potential employees. He said it’s also a good idea to look at smaller internships through their college years.
“Nowadays I think it’s a lot harder to get hired on full-time just because everything is handled online as far as submitting a resume on line and then you have a computer matrix that sorts your resume,” Pandit said. “If students make the effort to go to a jobs conference or workshop you’re allowed to have that face to face interaction with somebody so that you can show your personality as well as your soft skills and hard skills. I think that gives you a leg up.”
Internships are frequently the first step for a career at Pirelli. The terms of internships may vary from location to location.