Co-ops Lay Foundation for Accomplished Raytheon Career
Co-op enabled James Sweeney, E’66, electrical engineering, to earn as he pursued a degree with work relevant to his chosen field and taught him important people skills that helped him navigate professional relationships during his over 40-year career at Raytheon.
James Sweeney, E’66, electrical engineering, committed to the field before he could get his hands dirty within it. Having only discovered it through his friends, who were taking electrical courses at their vocational high school, Sweeney took a gamble and applied to Northeastern based on interest alone.
In many ways, Sweeney’s gamble paid off. Now retired, Sweeney led a career at Raytheon that spanned decades, an organization he became familiarized with through a summer job as a draftsman he completed during his freshman year at Northeastern. Sweeney notably worked on the Patriot missile system at an intimate level for much of his Raytheon career. “I got to see the entire Patriot system,” he says. “It had all these subsystems and subsystems experts, and since I was the maintenance expert, I looked at everything.”
Sweeney was initially drawn to Northeastern for the co-op program. Coming from modest means, Sweeney knew he would have to work in some capacity to pay his way through upper education. Co-op allowed him to do so while gaining vital industry experience. “It sounded like the perfect thing,” he says. “Northeastern was going to provide a job, and it would be related to my work.”
He would later realize that the benefits of co-op far exceeded the immediate financial gain. After gaining multiple years of experience navigating professional environments, Sweeney developed a firm understanding of office politics, which let him step into his postgraduate role well-equipped to build and maintain professional relationships and overcome social obstacles. He built a career from this skill, connecting with individuals from multiple departments to finish a project.
After completing his summer job at Raytheon, Sweeney took on a co-op at AVCO, working on defense programs at their location in Lowell, Massachusetts. A challenge that ultimately guided Sweeney to AVCO was transportation, as he could not afford a car to drive himself to work each day. Ultimately, a carpool system was arranged for Sweeney with a handful of AVCO employees who lived in his town, which he today recognizes as an act of kindness that allowed him to pursue the role.
Sweeney worked at AVCO Lowell for two years, tasked with updating drawings in engineering books. The co-op built on his drafting experience from Raytheon while familiarizing him with systems work, which became important in his postgraduate work at Raytheon. AVCO also allowed Sweeney to connect with many engineers who took him under their wing. “The people I worked with were very nice,” he says. “They were mentoring me, and I became friends with them.”
When the government contract for the system he worked on was canceled, Sweeney took a manufacturing job at a small electronics firm, where he assembled and tested photoelectric cells. For his final co-op, Sweeney returned to AVCO at a different plant, where he worked on antennas. Both jobs deviated from what Sweeney was interested in, but they exposed him to other sides of the industry and taught him skills he would not have learned otherwise.
Shortly after graduating, Sweeney secured a job interview at Raytheon around the time that the Patriot missile was entering development. He immediately began working on Patriot as a designer in the systems department after being hired. The role relied heavily on the networking skills he built during his co-ops, which he used to coordinate tasks with employees in other departments to advance the project.
As his time at Raytheon progressed, Sweeney’s connections with experts across multiple departments spread, furthering his knowledge of missile systems, even components not directly maintained by his department. Raytheon also put Sweeney in contact with several soldiers and government workers, including a man who was caught in an air raid in Kuwait during his Raytheon service. “You got to meet a lot of interesting people there,” Sweeney says.
Sweeney earned a favorable reputation among his Raytheon coworkers for his drive and work ethic. After having a heart attack and taking a medical leave of absence later in his career, he returned to Raytheon and found that projects he had left unfinished months earlier had still not been completed. “In other words, nobody stepped in and did it,” Sweeney says. “Nobody wanted it.”
He remained at Raytheon for 39 years, only departing once for two days following a short-lived layoff. Five years after Sweeney’s retirement, he was invited to return for another five years, which he says was easy to reacclimate despite being away for so long. “It really hadn’t changed that much,” he says.
Across his career, Sweeney says the people skills he learned while on co-op were essential to his success, as it taught him how to connect with coworkers and avoid conflict. He also reflects on co-op as a vital part of his Northeastern experience, allowing him to fund his degree in jobs relevant to his field.
“I had a great co-op experience and a great experience at Northeastern,” he says.