IDEAS in Mind helps autistic students get engineering internships

Terry Matsunaga noticed his autistic son was having difficulties securing a job after graduating from the University of Arizona. It wasn’t due to a lack of talent, but a lack of social skills. 

“Sometimes he tries and before he even gets an interview, they hang up on him,” Matsunaga said. 

As a professor of neurosurgery and biomedical engineering at the U of A, Matsunaga realized that other college students on the Autism spectrum would face similar problems after graduation — and that there was something he could do to help. 

He contacted David W. Hahn, Craig M. Berge Dean of the College of Engineering, and Wendy Parent-Johnson, former director of the Sonoran Center for Excellence in Disabilities, about the idea. Both were receptive, and in 2020 the three of them founded what would become Internships Designed with Engineering Autistic Students in Mind.

In 2023, the IDEAS in Mind program began accepting students. Three years later, it has helped 45 autistic students find internships at engineering companies.

The IDEAS in Mind program offers support and vocational training to autistic students who want to secure internships at engineering companies. Though most applicants are engineering majors, a major in engineering is not required. 

Students meet twice a month for a career development workshop. Students can also have one-on-one consultations with Tyler Le Peau, a student support coordinator from the ENGAGED program, which provides services for underrepresented engineering students.

“They’ve done really cool workshops to kind of prepare us for what workplace environments are like… and I think it’s a really wonderful asset, because not a lot of programs, I feel like, do that,” said Shaddai Demerath-Shanti, a physics undergrad part of the fall 2025 IDEAS in Mind cohort.

“At least in my experience, I haven’t had a program that has focused on, ‘Okay, this is what your life after college is going to look like.’ So that was really cool,” he said. 

Other students take a more practical view. 

“The largest value in it, I would say, is getting your resume reviewed and getting to speak with people in the industry to see whether or not there are any changes you can make,” said Duncan Yuen, an aerospace engineering undergrad also in the fall 2025 cohort. “Because oftentimes if you’re applying to places, if they decline you, they’re not going to tell you why exactly that they did so.”

IDEAS in Mind also provides inclusive leadership and hiring training for companies involved. 

“I actually pretty much cold-called everybody,” said Matsunaga, who formerly served as the principal investigator. 

He was able to find interested parties at Raytheon and Texas Instruments who agreed to participate in the IDEAS in Mind program.

This dual-pronged approach is what makes the program special, according to Loretta Alvarez, the transition program manager at the Sonoran Center for Excellence in Disabilities and one of IDEAS in Mind’s corporate liaisons. 

“It’s not just up to the students to adjust and change everything about them to fit into this box, and it’s not just up to the companies to provide everything despite not knowing even where to start,” Alvarez said. “It’s meeting both of them where they’re at and trying to address the needs from there.”

IDEAS in Mind is also open to ideas from unexpected places. In the spring of 2025, the program hosted an improv class. According to Le Peau, a peer mentor suggested it could help the students build up their social skills. She contacted a professor from the English department who hosts improv workshops as a hobby to make it happen. 

“It really helped me understand how to be more flexible in the moment,” Le Peau said, “And also just helping students who might benefit from that type of exercise.”

This article was published in full by the Arizona Daily Wildcat.