Announcing Break Through Tech DC at UMD’s 2024 Sprinternship Host Organizations

Break Through Tech’s Sprinternship™ program is designed to help undergraduate women from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds break into careers in tech. This year, Break Through Tech DC is collaborating with 14 organizations to host micro-internships for 70 University of Maryland undergraduate students.

This January, these Sprinterns will spend three weeks tackling real business challenges while immersed in their host companies’ culture. Employers are gaining access to emerging tech talent and participating in advancing our mission. Meanwhile, student participants build their resumes and networks to become more competitive applicants for jobs and internships.

“We are so excited to have these 14 organizations hosting our Sprinterns this upcoming January,” said Kate Atchison, site lead for Break Through Tech DC at UMD and associate director of the Iribe Initiative for Inclusion and Diversity in Computing. “By hosting our UMD students, they are making a clear commitment to building a more inclusive tech ecosystem, and we look forward to working together to make that a reality.”

Six of this year’s Sprinternship hosts (with asterisks below) are returning after participating in the 2023 program.

• Appian – Sprinterns will work on a project furthering the capabilities of Appian’s low-code platform, either by focusing on new features, infrastructure projects, or new internal tool building for its engineers.
• BeaKen Systems & Technology Solutions, Inc. – Sprinterns will implement cybersecurity policy and procedures in preparation for cybersecurity compliance for government contracts. They will also work on office policies and procedures to prepare for auditing for ISO compliance certification.
• Capital One – Sprinterns will go “all-in” on Capital One’s Crypto Services Certificate Authority and implement new use cases, giving the Capital One team the power to update certificate data in real-time.
• Crown Castle* – Sprinterns will use tools such as Roboflow or OpenCV to create a workflow that identifies damage to fiber plants using machine learning and computer vision.
• Easy Dynamics* – Sprinterns will help prepare architecture documents, leveraging GitHub for version control.
• Exiger – Sprinterns will help Exiger’s Product team deliver on strategic objectives.
• Immuta – Sprinterns will build an internal tool to help our engineering team OR work on a data security/privacy project.
• KPMG* – Sprinterns will work on data analytics and/or visualization projects.
• Mastercard* – Sprinterns will create a new feature to make the process of creating events more efficient for clients. 
• Microsoft* – Sprinterns will develop a full-stack application to enable distributed information-sharing in these dynamic hybrid cloud environments. This service will be deployed on Microsoft Edge devices (e.g., laptops, phones, etc.).
• Skyward IT Solutions – Sprinterns will work on projects related to semantic search, knowledge systems and information extraction and data processing and mining at scale.
• Quantum Startup Foundry at the University of Maryland – Sprinterns will connect web-based resources to create a “bridge” that allows cross-posting to the Quantum Startup Foundry website, newsletter and LinkedIn. They will also develop a procedure manual for said “bridge” in lay terms for future users.
• Ticketmaster * – Ticketmaster is hosting three different Sprintern teams that will work on three different projects.
  1. Sprinterns will be paired with software and site reliability engineers to review a backlog of tasks and work with a scrum master on event-driven alerting, self-healing mechanisms and other automation.
  2. Sprinterns will create a visual dashboard to track historical API usage of Archtics, one of the core ticketing engines at Ticketmaster.
  3. Sprinterns will build a Slack messaging system to alert the Ticketmaster team and its clients about queued client survey data.

• University of Maryland Libraries – University Libraries has created a Pool Reports Collection to collect, preserve and make discoverable pool reports from the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA). Sprinterns will be embedded in the UMD Libraries’ team working to enrich the metadata for each email pool report and use cloud API services to automatically generate this metadata, add it to the application database and allow the metadata to be corrected/enhanced by the curator. 

Article by Break Through Tech

Interested in learning more about how your organization can join Break Through Tech's mission to achieve gender equality in tech? Check out our Sprinternship Overview.