When Kieran Sawyer starts up the torch to begin welding, the whole world disappears beyond his protective mask. Orange sparks fly, smoke rises beneath the facility’s roaring fans, and all he can see is the molten pool of metal he’s working on.
There is no room for distraction, though welding is often an error-riddled practice, especially at first. For the glass recycling startup KLAW Industries, it’s also a key part of its process to crush discarded glass and transform it into a greener form of concrete. The company constructs equipment that will transform bottles into eventual components for roads and buildings, and welding is what glues and melds those pieces together.
This can be a typical day’s work for a KLAW intern like Sawyer. From his very first day on the job, he was already on the facility floor.
“[Co-founder Jack Lamuraglia] was talking the other day about how beneficial it would be if automotive engineers learned how to do an oil change before they designed an oil pan for a car. If they understood how that works before they actually went into designing it, it would help them make a better, more efficient design for the person actually working with it constantly,” Sawyer said. “That was how I started my internship here: by actually going out on the floor and assembling the equipment.”
Sawyer, who is a student at SUNY Broome Community College, found the opportunity to work as an engineering intern at KLAW through New Energy New York’s Student Startup Experience (SSE). This program pairs New York college students with promising clean-tech and energy startups, funding their internships while covering all costs for companies.
Led by Binghamton University, NENY has awarded more than $1 million in stipends to college students since the program’s inception. Through SSE, students like Sawyer have the chance to jump headfirst into the entrepreneurial world, while startups finding their footing can also bolster their teams and accelerate their progress.
“From a company viewpoint, we’re a very, very young team. I’m 26 years-old, and I’m the oldest one here,” said Jacob Kumpon, mechanical engineer and KLAW co-founder. “We really wanted to also work with people our age, who were very eager to be hands-on and dive into technical problems and weren’t really set in their ways. They wanted to try and learn on the job, and we thought structuring it as an internship was a really great way to go about doing that.”
Kumpon and Lamuraglia noticed a growing problem in the recycling industry: too much glass ends up in landfills. But they developed a material called Pantheon™ that can take that unwanted glass and transform it into a partial replacement for cement, which strengthens concrete while also reducing carbon emissions.
“We wanted to start to grow our engineering footprint, which is why we got involved in this program. We found it to be very valuable,” Kumpon said.
During his time at school, Sawyer found himself bouncing around majors and personal projects, until he finally came upon his passion for engineering. He approached the chair of SUNY Broome’s Engineering Department looking for ways to break into the field and gain working experience: SSE offered an answer.
“From the moment I looked into it, I knew that it would be something really beneficial for me,” Sawyer said. “After that, I ended up just throwing my hat in the ring — which was amazing, because it was something I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. It’s worked out phenomenally.”
Sawyer and Kumpon met while the former was attempting to break the world record for the fastest quadcopter with his friend and fellow co-intern William Stinger. Thanks to this project, Sawyer got incredibly familiar with computer-aided design. Once Kumpon heard about the project through a mutual connection, he knew Sawyer had the initiative and spark to thrive as an intern with KLAW.
Since then, Sawyer has had the chance to do a bit of everything. Whether he’s out on the floor welding and dodging sparks, updating instructions for assemblers or optimizing designs on the computer, the one commonality tying it all together is: these are things he loves.
“I’ve done the design work, optimized it on the computer, but then I’m actually the one that goes out there and installs it on all the equipment. Part of that is just working in a startup. You need to be reliant on the people you have here to be able to do these things,” Sawyer said. “But it’s just amazing that I actually have the opportunity to do that, because I get the perspective of everybody.”
Before joining KLAW, Sawyer had only worked in food service, where it’s not usual to trust a newcomer with a stove on the first day of the job, he said. But Kumpon has built an interactive and collaborative culture at KLAW, getting both hands-on and all hands on deck.
“We try to understand what the machines are doing, what the problems are. You experience the problems for yourself and then come back in here and really old-fashioned whiteboard it out to come up with solutions that we can do and quickly try,” Kumpon said.
Sawyer said joining a team that immediately folded him into the mix without question has been invaluable for his own growth as a budding engineer.
“There was a good amount of proctoring and supervision, but they trusted me immediately with being able to use all the tools and machinery. That was really amazing, being able to break into a new field and environment where I’d never worked before,” he said. “These guys just immediately let me add value to the company, just by being here.”
Now, while Sawyer continues building out his practical skills, KLAW is on its way to meeting its own engineering goals for the end of the year, which includes establishing a pilot plant in Binghamton to jumpstart glass recycling locally. Being able to achieve that goal is in part thanks to the work of KLAW’s intrepid SSE interns.
“They’ve been a huge benefit to our engineering team and helped us go faster. I think that’s one of the advantages of being a young company and growing our engineering culture,” Kumpon said. “The ability for Kieran to go off on his own, make a real design improvement, and go out and implement it really does help push the company forward in a meaningful way.”
As the fall semester begins to close, Sawyer has found that he loves the work of building things that can someday better the world. He doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, but knows he’ll be at KLAW.
“Like most people in the world, I’m probably not going to know exactly what I want to do until I die,” he said with a laugh. “Every single day, you learn new things about yourself and how you want to structure your life. But I know I am a very hands-on person, so this job here really has been phenomenal in that sense.”
NENY SSE gives students of any majors from any college or university in New York state up to $10,000 in stipends per semester. Internships don’t just cover engineering, but can also encompass aspects like marketing, lab work, and research and development. Both companies and students can apply to join the program online.
“As far as students go, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t sign up for this program,” Sawyer said. “As long as you qualify, there is no reason not to try to go out and get this practical experience, especially at our age and the position we’re in as young brewing professionals.”