Center: Troy Brennan
Photo Credit: Thor Swift/Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Summer internships are an excellent opportunity for students to connect classroom lessons to the real world. Just ask Troy Brennan.
This summer, Brennan – a computer science information systems major and entrepreneurship minor –participated in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Technology Transitions’ (OTT) Entrepreneurship Program. During the 10-weeklong internship, he worked on a commercialization project around the environmental remediation of wastewater.
“The D.O.E. OTT Entrepreneurship Internship put theory into practice,” says Brennan, a student mentor in the Honors Entrepreneurship Living Learning Community (ELLC).
As an intern, he worked directly with Jefferson Lab, where his role was to develop a feasibility study and opportunity landscape for their electron beam irradiation device.
“Knowledge of particle physics was something that I had no background on, and being placed into a field where I had to learn a new technology really opened my eyes to how many opportunities are out there,” he adds.
Little did he know leaping into unknown territory would pay off.
Recently, program interns were invited to Berkeley Lab, where they toured facilities and delivered their commercialization feasibility presentations to a panel of lab and judges. Brennan came in second place for the Most Outstanding Presentation Award.
Brennan, a former student assistant who worked in the Department of Management and Marketing, is no stranger to competition. He has participated in different hackathons and pitch competitions before attending the College. In 2020, his team won the spring 2020 ImpactX final pitch for their company, BuzOff.
