Trying to land an internship at a leading tech company or start-up can be a depressing pursuit for many college students, requiring a sustained semester-long effort, often with little to show for it except a host of rejections.
Now Bowie State University, a historically black university in Bowie, Md., has created its own internship placement program. And it doesn’t require college students to jump through the standard Silicon Valley hoops, like spending countless hours studying for company coding tests or taking high-pressure technical assessments while a tech company interviewer watches.
“To be honest with you, it’s a brutal process,” he said. rose the lion, the chair of Bowie State’s computer science department, referring to the internship application process at many large tech companies. He described trying to cheer up stressed students as they prepared for technical interviews that, in his opinion, did not assess their skills or professional potential. “We see things very differently here at Bowie.”
To expand student opportunities, the computer science department established its own internship placement program last year in partnership with various companies and government agencies. The program aims to connect students directly with employers seeking internships. He also runs training sessions for students on interview skills and workshops on hot topics like machine learning.
Bowie’s approach offers students an alternative to the impersonal, large-scale application system of many big tech companies. That process typically involves tens of thousands of college students cold-submitting their resumes to online company portals, where candidates are initially sorted and ranked by resume-reading software.
At Bowie State, participating employers frequently come to campus to directly meet, mentor, interview, and recruit students for internships in a process that is more intimate than the one-off briefings tech companies typically host with university career centers. . And the Bowie process usually doesn’t involve high-stress technical testing. That has kept many students, some of whom work part-time jobs, from spending dozens of unpaid hours applying to Silicon Valley internship programs.
Founded in 1865, Bowie State is a computing powerhouse among historically black universities. The school is nationally known for its expertise in cybersecurity education. Last fall, the number of Bowie college students majoring in computing skyrocketed to 332, a 75 percent increase from 2019.
But in recent years, only a few Bowie students have gone through the vetting process at leading tech firms like Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle to get internships, Dr. Shumba said.
The competition can be tough. Adobe, the maker of Photoshop, said it normally hires about 600 interns out of the more than 100,000 applicants who apply for its US summer internship program each year.
Last summer, with the new program in place, 60 Bowie computer science students interned at companies like Deloitte, federal agencies like NASA, and local startups. one of them was dejai brownnow a senior, who is interested in cybersecurity.
Before she began applying for internships, Ms. Brown worked part-time at Chick-fil-A. Last year, after Dr. Shumba encouraged her to apply for a government security clearance, Ms. Brown obtained an internship with the Marine Corps Forces Cyber Command. She also did an internship at Battelle, a non-profit technology research giant.
“The recruiters from Battelle contacted me, took me through the interview process and ended up hiring me,” said Ms. Brown, 21. “That was a lot less stressful than it could have been with a coding interview.”
The Bowie State program addresses socioeconomic barriers, such as a lack of technical work experience or industry connections, that may prevent some students from obtaining internships.
To help younger students gain relevant experience, Dr. Shumba established computer science research internships on campus. Last year, she also took a group of students on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Grace Hopper Celebration in Florida, a major annual conference for women in technology. Six students returned to campus with internships or job offers from Apple, Bank of America, Citibank and other companies.
Among them was Roxan Rockefeller, now a junior, who worked as a software engineering intern last summer at Tata Consultancy Services, a technology company. Then, last fall at the conference, she attended a briefing from Eli Lilly, the drug giant. That led to an internship interview.
“I’m passionate about data and just started talking about how I want to explore as many areas as possible with my computer science degree,” said Ms. Rockefeller, 21. “The next day I got a call from one of the recruiters telling me on the phone that I got the internship.”
This year, Adobe started its own internship program with Bowie State, focused on cybersecurity. The internships are part of a larger effort by the company to help prepare more Black and Latino students for tech careers.
This summer, about a dozen Bowie State students will work as cybersecurity interns at Adobe. That will make Bowie students eligible for full-time job offers from Adobe after they graduate, just like hundreds of other summer interns at the company.
