Khoury News

Second wave of Khoury co-op consultants design customer retention software for Verizon

A new type of co-op — a unique collaboration between students, faculty, and industry — is underway at Khoury College, and one of the world's biggest telecomm companies is taking full advantage.

October 14, 2025

by Emily Spatz

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Third-year data science major Vichu Selvaraju knew he didn’t want a typical co-op.    

“The biggest thing I was looking for was being able to take control of the work,” he said.  

Instead, Selvaraju applied to and was hired by Northeastern’s Co-op Consultancy Program. For six months, he worked with a team of five other students to design, from start to finish, software that could help Verizon retain customers and understand reasons for customer turnover.  

The co-op consultancy, which was piloted in fall 2024, is an innovative take on traditional Northeastern co-op. Instead of working directly for a company, teams of four to six students are hired by Northeastern to build business solutions for companies that partner with the university.  

The first cohort of students worked for the State Street financial services corporation and in spring 2025, Northeastern added Verizon as a program partner. Students on the Verizon team said their experience was transformative, offering challenges and growth opportunities that other jobs wouldn’t.  

“You have so much ownership over the project, which does present many challenges,” said Afnan Tuffaha, a third-year computer science student. “But I find that the greatest learning is done through solving these problems and overcoming these challenges.” 

Students built software that aggregates publicly available data about both Verizon’s and competitors’ clients. Machine leaning draws conclusions about the data, and that information is then converted to an interactive dashboard Verizon can use to track client sentiment and turnover. It’s now up to company leadership how they implement and build upon students’ work. 

Students said one of the most important skills they learned during the six months was how to interact and communicate with customers. The team met with Verizon executives every two weeks to provide project updates.  

“We've had so much work in terms of preparation for presentations and meetings and even just ensuring professionalism that I'm very grateful for,” Tuffaha said. “I have so much new knowledge on how to communicate to different people from different backgrounds.” 

The opportunity to meet and present ideas to company as well as university leadership gave the students access others rarely get.   

“To meet all these incredible people, communicate with them, absorb their knowledge, and add that to my daily life and work was such a great experience,” Selvaraju said.  

Beyond meeting industry leaders, students also found value in working together, another experience not all co-ops offer.  

“Everyone I work with is also a co-op, so it kind of gives the energy that you're just interacting with other students, and obviously we all want to help each other learn things,” said Priya Singh, a third-year computer science and design major. 

For Singh, the co-op was also a way to figure out what she enjoys about computer science and design. Because students largely directed their own work, they could choose which aspects of the project to take on. Describing herself as more design-oriented, Singh said challenging herself to help with the computer science aspects of the project strengthened her coding skills and helped her discover an interest in machine learning.  

“I’ve come out of the experience knowing way more than I did when I came in,” she said. “I know what I’m good at and what I want to become good at, and I don’t know that I would’ve had that exposure had I done a more traditional co-op.” 

Throughout the length of the program, which varies based on client needs, students receive extensive expertise and guidance. Teams are supervised by James Chang-Davidson, Khoury College’s director of industry-aligned student programs, who helps teams every day with technical and nontechnical issues.  

“For a lot of students, this is an opportunity to do a co-op with an external partner but have the safety net of the full Northeastern community to support them,” said Liz Zulick, Northeastern’s senior vice chancellor for education innovation. 

Mark Fontenot, a teaching professor and assistant dean of student experience at Khoury College, advises teams on everything from technical specs and solutions to making sure they are prepared for client presentations. But the students do most of the work themselves. 

“That’s what’s great with these students; they don’t need to have their hands held,” Fontenot said. “You can give them drops of knowledge, and they can take that and run with it." 

For companies, having the insight of both students and professors is valuable, and consulting co-ops offer a new pathway for collaboration. Paul Sullivan, vice president of Verizon, said the company often looks for ways to partner with academia.  

“They're looking at it with totally different eyes,” Sullivan said. “A lot of times, from an industry standpoint, we look at data and we get tunnel vision. When you can bring other folks in and students with the faculty helping to guide them, the world's your oyster.” 

Students on the Verizon team said that as challenging as the work was, it was just as rewarding. If anything, some wanted more than six months to make their solution even better.  

“I feel like everyone on the team shared the same idea. We wanted to keep working on it, really bring it to what it could be,” Selvaraju said. “But we're limited to the six months, and I think we met everything that we had to.” 

On the final day of the co-op, the Verizon team presented its final product to senior leadership from Verizon and Northeastern.  Sullivan said the Verizon team’s final presentation was “amazing” and expanded on what the company initially asked it to do, looking beyond just Verizon’s customers to include competitor data.  

“I saw them at the beginning to where they are now,” he said. “The growth was just humongous.”