By Natasha Singer
Trying to obtain an internship at a leading tech company or start-up can be a depressing quest for many college students, requiring a sustained, semester-long effort — often with little to show for it but a slew of rejections.
Now Bowie State University, a historically Black university in Bowie, Md., has created its own internship placement program. And it does not require undergraduates to jump through standard Silicon Valley hoops, such as spending countless hours studying for company coding tests or taking high-pressure technical assessments while a tech company interviewer looks on.
“To be honest with you, it’s a brutal process,” said Rose Shumba, the chair of Bowie State’s computer science department, referring to the internship application process at many large tech firms. She described trying to buoy stressed-out students as they prepared for technical interviews that she thought did not assess their skills or professional potential. “We see things very differently here at Bowie.”
To widen opportunities for students, the computer science department set up its own internship placement program last year in partnership with a number of companies and government agencies. The program aims to match students directly with employers seeking interns. It also holds training sessions for students on interview skills and workshops on hot topics like machine learning.
The Bowie approach offers students an alternative to the impersonal, mass-scale application system at many large tech firms. That process typically involves tens of thousands of college students submitting their résumés cold to online company portals, where candidates are initially sorted and ranked by résumé-reading software.
At Bowie State, participating employers come frequently to campus to get to know, mentor, interview and directly recruit students for internships in a process that is more intimate than the one-off information sessions that tech companies often arrange with university career centers. And the Bowie process does not typically involve high-stress technical tests. That has spared many students, some of whom have part-time jobs, from spending dozens of unpaid hours on applying for Silicon Valley internship programs.
Founded in 1865, Bowie State is a computer science powerhouse among historically Black universities. The school is known nationally for its expertise in cybersecurity education. Last fall, the number of Bowie undergraduates majoring in computing soared to 332, a 75 percent jump from 2019.
But over the last several years only a few Bowie students have made it past the vetting process at leading tech firms like Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle to obtain internships, Dr. Shumba said.
The competition can be stiff. Adobe, the maker of Photoshop, said it typically hires about 600 interns from the more than 100,000 candidates who apply for its summer internship program in the United States each year.
