Hello QUESTees! I hope your fall is off to a great start! For this month’s issue, we’re highlighting how three QUEST students went above and beyond during their summers! From creating a website for local non-profits to working on airplanes, let’s go see their stories!
Continue readingCategory Archives: Internship Experiences
Beyond the Classroom: A Summer for Growth and Discovery
As the semester comes to a close, students are looking forward to their summer plans. While some are excited to travel or catch up with friends and family, many students are also using the break as an opportunity to take on jobs and internships. This week, I had the chance to learn about a variety of internships that QUESTees are getting involved with.
Continue readingMaking a Global Medical Impact: Student Spotlight on Wilhelm Smith
This month, I had the pleasure of speaking with Wilhelm Smith, a junior bioengineering major (Cohort 42). Currently a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Global Medical Devices Lab, Smith is working on creating a portable low-cost laparoscopy device for use in low and middle-income countries.
Three Weeks of Impact: Break Through Tech’s Sprinternship Program
What can you really achieve in just three weeks? These QUEST students pushed the limits of a typical software engineering internship and delivered real results.
Over the course of three weeks in January 2025, two QUEST students, Joanne Lee (Q44) and I, Neola Dsouza (Q44), gained invaluable technical experience, built strong professional connections, and contributed to creating a meaningful impact.
Both Lee and I got our internships through Break Through Tech’s Sprinternship program. Break Through Tech is a unique opportunity at UMD, part of the Iribe Initiative for Inclusion and Diversity in Computing. The organization provides many opportunities for students in tech at the University of Maryland, regardless of their major. Their programs, such as the Sprinternship, aim to help students build community in tech and gain professional experience that will lead to future internships and jobs.
Lee, a sophomore pursuing a dual degree in Computer Science and Immersive Media Design with a minor in Statistics, interned at Mastercard. During her internship, she worked with four other students to create a fully-functional web interface that allowed users to select the feature from a dropdown menu, input a start and end date, and receive a unique financial pattern analysis from the system based on those dates. This fixed dates feature would become part of an internal financial pattern analysis tool that Mastercard already uses to provide consulting to their client companies.
Reflecting back on her experience, Lee says that “balancing professionalism with approachability” helped her form strong connections and leave a positive impression! She bonded with her fellow Sprinterns through exploring Mastercard’s Arlington office, solving challenging problems, eating lunch together, and playing Super Smash Bros matches in their game room. Professionally, she frequently had coffee chats with current employees and learned about how they navigated their own career paths. “I think there’s a lot of emphasis on knowing exactly what your career goals are as a student, especially in the software engineering community,” said Lee. “And it was nice to gain some perspective from people who have been in the field for a long time.”
Through her Sprinternship, Lee strengthened her intuitive skills and picked up the best practices needed to succeed as an intern. She looks forward to applying this knowledge in her upcoming summer software development internship at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
At the same time, I had the opportunity to intern at the University of Maryland Libraries, where I also worked on a real-world software development project. I am a sophomore pursuing a dual degree in Computer Science and Geographical Sciences with a concentration in Geospatial Data Science. During January, I worked with three other interns to design and build a replacement IP manager web application. Administrators could access the site through an improved user interface, and the Libraries’ external applications, such as their websites and online databases, could access the data through the site’s API.
My highlight over those three weeks was meeting with and talking to not only software developers, but also to directors, librarians, and the former dean of UMD Libraries. Through those conversations, I learned about how libraries operate and their role in storing and sharing knowledge. I’ve realized how important it is to me to work on a project that’ll make a positive impact. When our application goes live, many faculty, students, and researchers across campus and the world will have a better experience accessing digital content through the Libraries’ sites and databases!
This summer, I am excited to apply all of the technical and collaborative skills I’ve developed to my software engineering internship at United Airlines.
Students can get involved with Break through Tech by attending events, joining student organizations such as the Association for Women in Computing, CODE: Black, and Technica or by participating in their professional mentoring program or the RESET Project, a program that offers scholarships and community building with a focus on BLNA women!
Breaking Into Tech, One Social Media Post at a Time: A Student Spotlight on Ume Habiba
Meet Ume Habiba, a senior who’s helping women break into the tech industry! She’s gained 87,000 followers on Instagram since March and has spoken at multiple tech conferences, including Google’s DevFest, Kode with Klossy’s speaker series, and php[tek]!
Beyond the Classroom: QUEST’s Summer Internships
One thing about QUESTees – everyone is going above and beyond in every way, and this summer was no exception! I spoke to five different students to hear about their internships experiences all over the country.
QUEST Students Soar Through Summer
Even though school isn’t in session over the summer, that doesn’t change the fact that QUEST students are always doing amazing things. This summer, 86% of QUEST sophomores and juniors participated in internships, while another 5% continued coursework or participated in research and another 5% had full-time jobs. The top companies to hire QUEST interns were Capital One, KPMG, and Meta (each with 5 students from QUEST). QUESTPress is excited to highlight two of our students and take a look back at their summers!
Seattle to San Antonio: QUEST Students Recap their Summers
With QUEST being filled with such ambitious students, it’s no surprise to hear about the impressive and exciting summers its students have! Not only do students gain a variety of internship, research, or work experience, they also make sure to have fun.
Michelle Lui (Cohort 34) interned at Discovery, Inc. as a data science intern working on the Food Network Kitchen app. This was her first experience working in the tech industry, whereas her internship last summer was in consulting. She said, “My favorite part was being able to work with consumer data and conduct behavioral analysis on app interactions. It was also so interesting seeing all the data that is collected and processed behind the scenes in order to make continuous improvements to the product.” Outside of her internship, she went on multiple short trips to new cities including Boston, Portland, New York City, and Ithaca to see friends from both high school and college. During her time in Seattle, she visited the Discovery, Inc. office in person, hung out with fellow interns that lived in the area, and even went to the QUEST meetup where she met someone from Cohort 1! In between, she caught up on some summer reading and says, “If you’re looking for recommendations, my favorites were Pachinko and The Namesake.”
Michelle strolling the streets of NYC this summer
A New Kind of Summer Internship
Summer is usually an excellent time to augment the lessons learned in classrooms with other experiences like internships. Being able to work in the industry with professionals is incredibly rewarding. Interns are left with memories that last them a lifetime. Although circumstances aren’t ideal this summer, many QUEST students will be fortunate enough to participate in some fun internships, even if they are virtual. These might not be normal times, but QUEST students are still adapting to the challenging circumstances. I was able to get an inside look at some of our students’ summer plans:
Gesna Aggarwal, a computer science major in Cohort 32, will be a Software Engineering Intern at Microsoft. She’ll be a part of the Azure team, working in the realm of Cloud technology. Gesna was able to connect with QUEST alumni who work at Microsoft in the QUEST Lab and at the fall career fairs. They encouraged her to apply to the position and answered her questions, too. One of them, Julia Lomakina from Cohort 26, made a great impression on Gesna. They talked about the Microsoft Employee Hackathon, where Julia had created a solution that helped make education more accessible. This inspired Gesna, who’s excited about being able to craft her own innovations this summer. She’s also excited to be able to learn a lot on the job and network with as many people as possible. Her internship has been converted to a remote one due to the current situation, but she’s excited to make the most of this opportunity and have a blast anyway!
Owen Roy, a bioengineering major in Cohort 32, will be interning at Rise Therapeutics in Rockville, MD. Rise is a biotechnology company leveraging research to develop biopharmaceuticals that can be taken orally instead of intravenously. Owen will be working to develop these therapies and get them approved for general use, as well as situate the company to succeed in the larger market. He leveraged his experiences from 190H and 390H when he was interviewing for the role. He said, “Because of my experiences in QUEST, I was able to present myself as someone who was interested and capable in both the technical and business sides of the biotechnology industry.” This will be Owen’s first experience in the biotechnology industry, so he hopes to be able to explore it and narrow down his interests for full-time roles. He hopes to be able to make a difference in any way possible and is looking forward to getting hands-on experience with the various operations of the company. Owen is unsure if his internship will be in-person or remote at the moment, but said that if he’s unable to go into the labs, he will focus more on the business side of the company. Either way, he feels fortunate to have this position and hopes to make the most of it.
Anusha Dixit, an aerospace engineering major from Cohort 31, will be a Systems Engineering Intern on the Exploration Medical Capability project for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. She’ll be adding to systems engineering models documenting baseline medical systems for future missions, as well as modeling the likelihood of medical conditions occurring on a mission. She thinks her experiences working with data in QUEST, coupled with a previous internship in the same field, helped her land the role. She’s very excited to see how medical systems for spaceflight missions are modeled, especially going into the Artemis moon missions. She’s also looking for opportunities to grow professionally and make great connections. Although her internship has been converted to a remote one, Anusha says she’s “still extremely thankful to be getting valuable work experience in these unprecedented times.”
All of these experiences sound incredible. Even though the summer has been dampened a little bit by these unusual circumstances, it’s great to see that QUEST students are still making the most out of the situations they find themselves in. Best of luck, everyone!
Summer Recap: Internships
QUEST students are well known for being involved and on the go during the semester, and we certainly don’t stop once school lets out. From systems engineering in San Francisco (Renee Adkins, Q23) to reimagining the orchestra right here at home (Sarina Haryanto, Q26), QUEST students have made a splash all over the country. For more details on what everyone’s been up to this summer, check out the #QUESTinterns series on Instagram!