Engineering Intern; Metallurgical​/Mineral Processing​/Chemical

Intel-E-Waste | State College, PA – On-Site | $25–$35/hr commensurate with education and experience | Full-time temporary and Part-time opportunities are available;
Duration:
Flexible | For this position, the company does not sponsor applicants for work visas. However, the company actively assists CPT/OPT-eligible students in achieving their career objectives; therefore, CPT/OPT-eligible applicants are encouraged to apply for this part-time, off-campus position.

• Are you an engineering student who chose this field because you wanted to solve real problems – only to find that most of your coursework has you analyzing cases that someone else already solved, using data that someone else already collected?
• Have you ever thought seriously about what happens to electronics the world discards every year – the phones, the laptops, the solar panels – and wondered why so little of the copper, gold, and silver inside them is ever recovered? And whether someone with your training could help fix that?
• What would it mean to your development as an engineer to spend a semester – or a summer – not running problem sets, but running actual experiments, on real materials, for a technology that is moving toward commercial scale right now?
• When was the last time you stepped into a lab with true curiosity, driven not by grades but by the thrill of genuine discovery? If you’re having trouble remembering … keep reading.
• And this one: are you the kind of student who notices the gap between how something is supposed to work and how it really works – and wants to understand why, rather than just moving on to the next assignment?

If you are currently pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree in engineering, materials science, chemistry, or a closely related technical field – and you are genuinely curious about materials processing, sustainability, and what it takes to build a technology company from the ground up – you owe it to yourself to find out what Intel-E-Waste is building.

Meet Intel-E-Waste

E-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream on the planet and expected to more than double by 2050. Every discarded phone, laptop, and solar panel contains copper, gold, silver, lithium, and other critical materials essential to the clean energy economy. Right now, most of it ends up in a landfill, and those materials are lost forever.

Intel-E-Waste was founded by a research team with deep expertise in mineral processing and extractive metallurgy, the same scientific principles that govern how the mining industry separates and recovers metals, applied now to the materials hiding inside your discarded electronics. Backed by federal funding and years of rigorous laboratory research, the team developed and patented a low-cost, heat-free, zero-waste process that selectively separates multiple critical materials from e-waste, a turnkey solution adaptable to existing recycling facilities or deployable at collection sites that currently perform no material recovery.

The technology is validated, the market mapped, and key relationships are underway. Now comes the real work: turning proven processes into scalable, deployable, physical systems. You will contribute directly through the experimental program driving this transformation.

Why This Internship and Why Now

This is not a coffee-and-copies internship. It is a working role inside a small, funded, patent-backed startup at the precise moment when the experimental program that will determine this company’s commercial future is being built and run. The work you do here connects directly to outcomes, not through six layers of organization, but through the next conversation with the engineer standing next to you in the lab.

The intern who joins now will:

• Work alongside – and report directly to – the Process Development Engineer and Managing Director. In an organization this size, there is no buffer between you and the people making decisions about what gets built next.
• Contribute to real experimental work: sample preparation, equipment operation, data collection and analysis that feeds directly into the process development program. Your data will be used.
• Develop practical analytical and…