CBEE Club hosts Trent Waddell, a senior engineering and business leader specializing in automation, robotics, and advanced manufacturing systems. and an OSU Chemical Engineering alum. He currently leads the Automation and Robotics Business Unit at Andrews Cooper, where he is responsible for strategy, execution, and business performance across some of the most complex automation programs in industry. Free Food!
At Andrews Cooper, his work centers on engineering the impossible by turning high risk, ambiguous problems into systems that perform reliably in the real world.
His key message for students is your major gives you a foundation. Your career is shaped by how you apply it.
Andrews Cooper is an engineering services company that helps organizations solve problems when technical risk is high, requirements are unclear, and failure is not an option. We work on problems that others consider too complex, too ambiguous, or too risky. In practice, that often means engineering the impossible. Not by ignoring constraints, but by understanding them deeply and designing systems that work within real world limits. We are not a product company, and we are not staff augmentation in the traditional sense. We partner with teams when problems are ambiguous, complex, and difficult to solve internally, especially when success requires crossing disciplines, questioning assumptions, and building systems that have never existed before.
Engineering the impossible, for us, means taking ideas that feel out of reach and turning them into reliable, manufacturable, real world solutions.
Who We Hire
We hire engineers who want to work on real problems, not just predefined tasks. We look for engineers who are motivated by engineering the impossible rather than avoiding uncertainty.
Backgrounds We Commonly Hire From
• Chemical Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• Mechatronics Engineering
• Robotics Engineering
• Computer Engineering
• Manufacturing Engineering
• Industrial Engineering
Strong fundamentals matter more than a perfect major match.