Industrial and systems engineering senior earns Frank Vandegrift Award

Parth Ranchhod, an industrial and systems engineering senior, has received the 2020 Frank Vandegrift Co-Op Student of the Year Award.

Established in honor of Frank Vandegrift, a former director of the Cooperative Education Program at Auburn University, the award is given each year as a testament to an outstanding engineering co-op student.

Ranchhod fulfilled his co-op at Cox Communications and completed an internship with Truist Securities, both headquartered in Atlanta.

Spending two rotations with Cox Communications, the largest private telecom company in America, Ranchhod developed the “Customer Service Ecosystem” dashboard. 

Ranchhod was able to see his project provide real-time insight to the chief technology officer to aid in the company’s organizational efforts with unique data during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The dashboard helped visualize customer purchasing activity across our 21 markets and used predictive analytics to find trends,” he said.

He attributes his newly found skill of identifying extensive trends and issues to his time at Cox Communications. The co-op challenged him to erase his preconceived notion of viewing a business entity as its immediate teams, and instead to examine it as an operating system optimized through its moving, internal parts.

“Auburn’s Co-Op program has been instrumental in the development of my abilities to identify complex problems and present informed arguments and solutions,” Ranchhod said. “I’m grateful for the Auburn Co-Op program for propelling my career forward, and I would enthusiastically recommend any future Auburn student in participating.”

Ranchhod will represent Auburn University in a national competition hosted by the Cooperative Education and Internship Association.