50 Years of Co-op: Gillian Kelleher

Tell us a bit about yourself, what course did you study in UL, what has your career looked like to date?

I studied Electronic Engineering at UL starting in 1981 and graduated in 1985 with an honours degree. After graduation, I moved to The Netherlands where I started working for Philips Electronics. I honestly cannot imagine a better employer or a better start to an engineering career in those days. My intention was to spend one year at Philips, but I was having so much fun, I stayed for 20 years. I worked at the Philips Center for Manufacturing Technology where we developed and industrialised new products and built the production lines needed to produce them. It was a fantastic work environment, everything was possible and there was a huge incentive to learn and grow.  

By 2004 many things had changed in the electronics world, and I decided it was time for a new phase. I founded 2M Engineering in 2004 and left Philips in 2005, after exactly 20 years.

This year 2M Engineering will celebrate her 20^th birthday. It has been a whirlwind journey with many ups and downs. 2M develops medical devices, wearable devices and sensor solution to solve water and environmental challenges. We develop our own products and also develop OEM products for other companies.( www.2mel.nl and www.dutchmedicaldevices.com). I am a very hands-on CEO of both companies and am still enjoying new technology challenges and finding ways to improve the world with our products.

Amazingly, after 20 years, I am still in regular contact with many of my old Philips colleagues, long-lasting bonds were formed in the work environment in those days.

Tell us a bit about your co-op placement, what organisation did you work with and what year it took place?

My co-op was at Atari Ireland from April to December 1983. The factory was set up to produce the Atari games console for the European market. All the development work was done in the US and instructions were mostly faxed to Ireland in what seemed to be a very unstructured and chaotic way.

Atari had a rotation plan where the co-op students were rotated around the different departments in the factory every 6-8 weeks. This meant we got a “sniff” of each department but were never there long enough to be productive. This was great for the students but maybe not too great for Atari. Atari certainly had the technology but for whatever reason it never really seemed to come together.

One year later, in December 1984 Atari shut down their plant in Limerick.

What impact did your co-op placement have on your future career?

I guess for me the main takeaway from my co-op at Atari was the realisation that for a company to be successful, many things need to be in place and even then there is no guarantee that a business will be successful. This was one of the reasons I chose Philips in 1985. Philips was a family-run business that was very well-established and had a reputation for quality products. Philips had a broad range of product divisions, everything from medical to telecommunications, consumer and professional products as well as a defence division. Philips did their R&D and everything from R&D to production was vertically integrated, giving Philips a very strong position back in 1985. After my co-op at Atari working at Philips was a dream job.

What piece of advice would you give to students going on co-op now?

Use your co-op time to learn as much as you can, not only about the company or the technology but also about yourself. My experience is that you never really know what a job is like until you actually do it and at the end of the day every job is what you make of it yourself.

Co-op is a great opportunity to get a real feeling for the type of work you like and the type you don’t. Most importantly; stay open and flexible, every business is transient.