Colby Milligan was still trying to sort out his summer plans when an email in his inbox caught his eye. The mechanical engineering major read the message, which advertised an opportunity for University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering students to spend two summer months interning at a ship-building company in Italy.
“That sounded pretty sweet,” says Milligan, who hadn’t yet been able to fit a study abroad experience into his busy engineering class schedule. “I was glad to be able to mesh a work experience with being able to go abroad.”
Milligan was one of four undergraduate students in the College of Engineering who spent two months during summer 2024 in the port city of Trieste, Italy, working for Fincantieri, one of the world’s largest shipbuilding companies.
They were the first international students to work at the company’s headquarters in the northeastern tip of Italy near the Slovenian border. The internships were part of the UW Signature Internships program offered by the UW-Madison International Academic Programs office, which connects engineering students to study- and intern-abroad experiences.
Marcus Thelen. Submitted photo.
Milligan, fellow mechanical engineering major Cesar Velez and engineering mechanics major Petar Vorkapich worked as design engineers, while mechanical engineering major Marcus Thelen served on Fincantieri’s project management team.
Thelen, a senior from Madison graduating in December 2024, says his two months in Italy showed him just how challenging project management can be—particularly when working on the gargantuan cruise ships Fincantieri produces for some of the world’s leading cruise lines.
“They’re worth close a billion dollars generally,” says Thelen, who’s planning to take some of those lessons into a career in construction project management after graduation.
Milligan, Velez and Vorkapich, meanwhile, designed diagrams and performed underlying calculations for ventilation systems—work that’s being implemented by the company.
“I know a lot of internships kind of give interns the ‘side’ projects, but it was super cool to hear that the work we did was actually impactful and meaningful,” says Milligan, a junior from San Francisco.
“It was cool to see we made an impact in the short amount of time we were there,” adds Velez, a junior from New York.
Gabriele Librandi, manager for university and research at Fincantieri and the point person for the internship program, says his colleagues were impressed by how quickly the UW-Madison engineering students grasped concepts and contributed. That’s no accident, says Russ Johnson, the college’s director of corporate relations who, along with John Garnetti from the Office of Business Engagement, helped broker the partnership with Fincantieri.
“Badger engineers come out well-equipped to hit the ground running because of the emphasis that we make on hands-on training: things like senior design projects, hands-on lab work, as well as the strong internship and co-op programs that we offer,” says Johnson. “Many engineering schools claim to have similar programs, but we clearly excel at providing these experiences.”
Librandi says Fincantieri, which operates shipyards in Marinette and Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, is eager to continue welcoming more summer interns (students who are interested in interning for Fincantieri in summer 2025 should apply by Nov. 18, 2024) while also exploring potential research collaborations with UW-Madison engineering faculty members in areas such as human-robot collaboration, cybersecurity and more.
Milligan, Thelen, Velez and Vorkapich are excited to see others follow their lead.
“We were kind of the guinea pigs for the program. It was super fun to be the guinea pigs in Italy,” says Milligan. “Hopefully it’s the first data point in a series of many.”
Students Colby Milligan, Cesar Velez and Petar Vorkapich and other UW-Madison staff members toured Fincantieri’s shipyard in Marinette, which builds frigates for the U.S. Navy. Submitted photo.
Top photo caption: From left, students Marcus Thelen, Petar Vorkapich, Colby Milligan and Cesar Velez outside Fincantieri’s headquarters in Trieste, Italy. Submitted photo.