But for a brief flirtation with becoming a surgeon, senior computer engineering major Arvind Krishnan has long aimed to open a biotech company and battle a yet-to-be-determined disease.

That is an unusual track for a computer engineer, but the internships Krishnan has worked while a Rose-Hulman student have confirmed his career choice and prepared him for entrepreneurship, he said.

“I’ve always had a fondness for the medical field … but I didn’t want to go that route,” he said. Instead, he researched options and undertook experiences that exposed him to various career possibilities, ultimately deciding that his computer engineering education could make a difference in health care.

“It’s actually really cool to see the impact you make,” Krishnan said. “That was one of the reasons for me wanting to get into the pharma biotech world.”

Though he was accepted by larger schools, Krishnan, who grew up in San Diego, chose to attend Rose-Hulman because “I wanted a little bit more hands-on learning and more attention, to be able to reach out to a professor.” At Rose, he has joined the Rose Innovative Student Entrepreneurs organization; lived with like-minded students; and participated in a career fair that led to his first internship.

That happened at Eli Lilly and Co., where in summer 2021 he tackled vial breakage during the manufacturing process of one drug and sought to resolve batch-to-batch variability in another.

He spent the first half of 2022 in a co-op position at Moderna Inc., where he wrote code to speed up and automate drug testing using a liquid-handler robot.

Just days after completing the Moderna co-op, Krishnan parachuted into a multidisciplinary team at Element Biosciences, a San Diego startup that makes speedy DNA sequencers. He joined a team that sought to resolve a critical problem – clearing up fuzziness in an optical instrument and optimizing the process for which it is used.

“Each experience builds upon one another,” Krishnan said. The Lilly experience was pure manufacturing; the Moderna work was at “the intersection of manufacturing and R&D;” and the Element work was more R&D-focused. All “build me to get to that goal one day,” he said.

After 12 weeks at Element, Krishnan returned to the Rose campus to complete the class work that will enable him to graduate in May; he expects to complete his master’s degree in engineering management in November. Thereafter, he plans to work in industry for several years to learn other aspects of entrepreneurship before venturing out on his own.

Krishnan is independent, productive and smart and thus “could do lots of different things,” said systems engineer Cassandra Niman, his supervisor at Element. “The traits that he exhibited during the internship are pretty generally helpful in whatever he wants to do in the future.”