IT WAS THE MAGNET that drew Andy (Qingchao) Kong halfway around the world. With co-op now available to graduate engineering students, Kong could work at an American company as part of his education. Not only would this allow him to apply his academic training to real-world challenges, it would also expand his professional network and help launch his career. “It has always been a dream of mine to do something meaningful for humanity and I’m willing to do whatever I have to do to achieve that goal,” says Kong, who came to Northeastern from China. During his co-op at Abiomed—the company that developed the first artificial heart—Kong worked on the design team for the company’s flagship Impella heart pump. His supervisor at the company was Caitlyn Hastie, E’06, who holds 10 patents and has 13 more patents pending, most of them focused on the heart pump she was working on with Kong. “We were working on real-world engineering problems,” explains Kong. “When you’re at a company like Abiomed, you have to take the fundamentals you learn in textbooks and apply them to a final product. We were making a real impact on the lives of patients so they could return to their families and have a good quality of life.” Kong earned two master’s degrees at Northeastern—the first in mechanical engineering, ME’14, and the second in bioengineering, ME’16,— and now works full-time at Abiomed.
32 Engineering @ Northeastern | Spring 2020
photo by Matthew Modoono
Taking Graduate ExperiencePowered Learning to the Next Level
