My Co-op Gig: Asghar Kazmi

Undergraduate computer science student Asghar Kazmi is interested in a career in software engineering, specializing in cloud infrastructure and development (technology that powers online services).

As he returns to New York Tech this fall, Kazmi reflects on his spring semester, when he put those tech skills to the test at GE Appliances.

From January through May, Kazmi took advantage of the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences’ cooperative (co-op) education program, which alternates an academic semester with full-time work in a role related to students’ fields of study. For Kazmi, this meant relocating to Louisville, Ky., to work as a software engineer intern at the corporate headquarters of GE Appliances—part of the Chinese multinational company Haier.

In his five months of employment, Kazmi did more than he could have imagined, including several large-scale projects. One involved implementing artificial intelligence (AI) agents to alleviate hours of manual work each week, improve consistency and quality within software development processes, and provide more cost-efficient solutions. With his degree concentration in AI, Kazmi was well-suited for the job.

“The greatest thing about my [co-op] experience was the nature of the work,” Kazmi says. “At GE, I was part of the innovation team and worked on driving business results using AI automations.”

Previously, employees in Kazmi’s department needed to write up individual tasks, generate diagrams, wait for approvals, and finally begin testing. With his AI agents, Kazmi turned a lengthy workflow into a much faster. High-quality, standardized task tickets were written in seconds, diagrams were provided immediately, and approval times became much shorter.

During his co-op, GE Appliances underwent licensing changes and shifting business priorities; Kazmi was asked to help migrate the company’s customer base from a third-party platform and into the customer management system Salesforce, and he happily obliged.  

“Suddenly I found myself as a key member of the five-person migration team,” he explains. “I thought that they might have small tasks for me here and there, but they were struggling with turning a huge non-relational dataset into relational data, and I was asked to take over.”

The months-long project was the highlight of Kazmi’s work experience, and he completed it using more than 25 Python scripts (sets of computer instructions) to transfer and transform data for more than 1.3 million customers.

“There is nothing better than a group of people working together to accomplish a large task, and it felt so fulfilling to be of great value to the team. I was even recognized for my critical contributions to the migration effort,” he says.

Kazmi admires the computer science field for how there is always something to learn, and his co-op duties were no exception. In addition to new technical skills and software expertise, he picked up successful management techniques and business perspectives, supporting his ongoing pursuit of personal and professional growth.

“My co-op with GE Appliances perfectly aligned with my career goals,” he reflects. “For me, this was the uncharted territory I was looking for to challenge myself.”