Stefan Eduardo Lütschg Espinosa graduated from Brown with his Master’s in biomedical engineering in May 2024. Thanks to connections made during his Brown co-op, Stefan’s future job was secured. Instead of scrambling to find work, he spent the month after commencement exploring Japan. “Once graduation rolled around, I was already sure of what I’d be doing post-grad,” he recalled. 

During his time as an undergraduate at Boston University, Stefan completed a summer internship with Phillips, a multinational medical device company that has its North America headquarters in Massachusetts. At the beginning of his second semester at Brown, Stefan was on the hunt for co-op opportunities. Brown’s BME master’s program allows students to earn credit for their work during co-ops. 

When he saw that Phillips had positions available, he jumped to apply. “I learned that usually if you see something, you have to bounce on it pretty quickly,” Stefan said. 

With the help of his advisors in BME, Stefan applied to roles at Phillips and secured a well-paid co-op. He commuted from Providence to the company’s Cambridge office three times per week to serve as a member of the company’s quality assurance team, while completing research and classes at Brown. 

“It was a fun experience balancing not just my co-op responsibilities, but also my other responsibilities at Brown—my classes and my research commitments,” Stefan said. 

While balancing his co-op with his research for Brown’s BrainGate consortium was sometimes “kind of crazy,” Stefan found the workload “manageable.” During his co-op, he continued to meet with BrainGate clinical trial participants and worked on his thesis, even going on to present his thesis research at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference. He also took a class where he reported on his co-op progress. 

The position at Phillips was never completely unsupervised, but Stefan proved himself capable. “By the time December rolled around, I had a little bit more leeway to do things independently because they saw that I was adjusting pretty well,” he said.

Stefan’s colleagues were always checking in on him and offering support. “I could generally take advantage of those opportunities where I could just pop by their desk and ask them about something,” he said.

That positive company culture drew Stefan back. In April of his final year at Brown, he reached out to his old advisors at Phillips to see if they had any available positions. By early May, he was hired as a contract software test engineer. 

“I had that connection with the team that I spent a whole six or seven months working with; they knew me very well,” he said. “They knew they could easily take me on as a teammate without much more additional training.”

Now, Stefan works on quality assurance for a hospital patient monitoring product that collects vital signs from patient monitors and displays information from all patient beds at a central nurse station. Alongside the rest of his team, Stefan assures that the product aligns with the company’s standards and clinical needs. 

Just one year post-grad, Stefan is already making strides at Phillips. He hopes to eventually secure a full-time position—either continuing in software test engineering or switching to software development. 

“My big passion is to work on those kinds of medical devices to help people,” Stefan said.