Khoury News

At Snowflake, Khoury co-ops take on independent cloud computing projects

September isn't typically the time to find a quality co-op. But Aayush Turakhia and Vinit Patel did just that, and spent their next few months crafting custom data solutions for clients at Snowflake.

March 30, 2025

by Juliana George

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Last fall, five Khoury students got the unusual opportunity to co-op at Snowflake, a cloud-based data storage company on the cutting edge of AI and machine learning.  

This co-op cycle marked the first time Snowflake had ever partnered with Northeastern, and the co-op listing didn’t appear on Northeastern’s job board, NUWorks, until early September, according to fourth-year computer science student Aayush Turakhia. Coming off a summer internship at Lowell-based software company UKG, Turakhia had all but given up on finding a four-month co-op and was enrolled in fall classes before Snowflake reached out for an interview. By the end of September, he had the job.  

Fourth-year computer science student Vinit Patel felt similarly lucky to have found the co-op late into the application process. Both Turakhia and Patel noted that Snowflake stood out from their previous work experiences in the amount of independence and responsibility they were given. 

Snowflake was a huge step for me. It’s probably one of the more valuable companies to get your hands on as a Northeastern student

Vinit Patel

“At some co-ops and internships, you don’t really get the chance to work on a project of your own, but we basically had full ownership over the product we were developing,” Turakhia said. “You don’t often see that at this stage in your career, so it was really exciting.”  

All five co-ops were hired to the Solution Innovation team at Snowflake’s Boston office, a division of the company focused on using Snowflake’s cloud architecture to create AI and machine learning solutions for clients. Four of the five, which also included third-year computer science and math student Daniel Yu and third-year computer science student Nidhi Jadhav, were given one major solution each to work on, ranging in sectors from financial services to video game development. The fifth, data science student Emily Liu, served as a technical program manager, overseeing the projects of the other four.  

Turakhia worked with data from Boston-based financial data and software company FactSet to build an AI-assisted analysis tool for the financial services industry. The dataset divided companies by sector, revenue, and a host of other factors, and Turakhia created an interface that made the data digestible and easy to navigate with support from AI.  

“I created a set of dashboards that visualized all that data, a set of AI assistants that extracted insights from it, and a chatbot that you could use to help you extract additional insights and visualizations,” he explained.  

This was the first time Turakhia had built a dashboard from scratch, and although he’s a firm believer in self-teaching and learning through experience, he recalled that his Khoury coursework in algorithmic thinking and programming methodology came in handy on the job. 

Patel’s solution focused on the retail sector. To help manufacturers and retailers make smart decisions about product pricing and supply chain management, he constructed a competitive intelligence tool that compared product data across retailers. Unlike Turakhia, Patel used a mix of internal data from Snowflake Marketplace and synthetic data generated to protect customer privacy.  
 

“In the retail space, it’s hard to match products across locations because product codes are not uniform across all these different retailers,” he said. “My solution focused on taking sales data and customer review data and creating aggregated data we could give to companies, like how a product performs across retailers or, for a retailer, how a product performs competitively in other markets.” 

Although Patel had previously worked with data, he had never done so at this scale; he guessed that the dataset for this project was around 15 million rows. He felt pleasantly challenged at Snowflake and complimented the straightforward onboarding process and “friendly” work environment.  

Yu produced “Player 360,” a machine learning solution that allowed gaming companies to build a data analytics platform that personalized player experiences and increased player retention. Jadhav developed an AI assistant for sales calls that aggregated and analyzed call transcript data for improved sales strategy.  

All of these solutions live permanently on the Snowflake website in the Solutions Center, cementing the students in the history of a rapidly growing cloud company decisively investing in AI.  

Turakhia is set to graduate in May, and he’s grateful for his experiences at Snowflake as he moves into the job market.  

“It was such a cool experience and a fun, interesting space to be in. There’s a lot of novelty and a lot of exciting innovation taking place, so it would be awesome to stay in that space,” he said.  

For Patel, who was approved for back-to-back co-ops and is currently working as a software engineering intern at Amazon Robotics, his graduation date is less certain — he’s thinking of taking on his third co-op in a row for the fall semester. But he is sure about one thing: His experience at Snowflake reaffirmed his passion for working in software.  

“Snowflake was a huge step for me. It’s probably one of the more valuable companies to get your hands on as a Northeastern student,” he said. 

Mary Trimarco, Khoury College’s director of strategic initiatives, set Northeastern’s partnership with Snowflake into motion through a contact at Snowflake and was thrilled by the outcome. Although the co-op is off the market for spring semester, she hopes the partnership will resume in the future.  

“This co-op made for a really unique experience where students got to work with customer data and put together a project from a problem all the way to a solution,” she said. “They all did really impressively.”