This traditionally black university created its own pipeline for tech interns

Trying to get an internship at a leading technology company or start-up can be a depressing quest for many students, requiring a semester’s sustained effort – often with little result other than a flurry of rejections.

Now Bowie State University, a historically black college in Bowie, Maryland, has created its own internship placement program. And it doesn’t require students to jump through standard Silicon Valley hoops, such as spending countless hours studying for business coding tests or taking high-pressure technical assessments while a technology company interviewer watches.

“To be honest, it’s a brutal process,” said Rose Sumba, the chairman of Bowie State’s computer science department, referring to the application process for internships at many major technology companies. She described trying to captivate stressed-out students as they prepared for tech job interviews that she felt failed to assess their skills or professional potential. “We see things very differently here at Bowie.”

To increase opportunities for students, the computer science department set up its own internship program last year in collaboration with a number of companies and government agencies. The program is designed to match students directly with employers seeking interns. It also hosts training sessions for students on interviewing skills and workshops on hot topics such as machine learning.

The Bowie approach offers students an alternative to the impersonal, mass application system at many large technology companies. That process typically involves tens of thousands of students who cold-submit their resumes to online company portals, where candidates are initially sorted and ranked by resume reading software.

At Bowie State, participating employers regularly come 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 technology companies often host with university career centers. And the Bowie process typically does not involve high-stress technical testing. That has saved many students, some of whom have part-time jobs, from spending dozens of unpaid hours applying for internship programs in Silicon Valley.

Founded in 1865, Bowie State is a computer science powerhouse among historically black universities. The school is nationally known for its expertise in cybersecurity education. Last fall, the number of Bowie students majoring in computer science rose to 332, a 75 percent increase from 2019.

But in recent years, only a few Bowie students have passed the vetting process at leading technology companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle to get internships, said Dr. Shumba.

Competition can be fierce. Adobe, the creator of Photoshop, said it hires about 600 interns each year out of more than 100,000 applicants who apply for its summer internship program in the United States.

Last summer, when the new program was in effect, 60 Bowie computer students interned at companies like Deloitte, federal agencies like NASA, and local start-ups. One of them was Dejai Brownnow a senior, who is interested in cyber security.

Before she began applying for internships, Ms. Brown worked part-time at Chick-fil-A. After dr. Shumba encouraged her to apply for a government security clearance last year, Ms. Brown got an internship with the Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command. She also did an internship Battelle, a non-profit technology giant.

“Recruiters at Battelle contacted me, took me through the application process and eventually brought me in,” said Ms Brown, 21, . “That was a lot less stressful than what it could have been with a programming 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 pursuing internships.

To help younger students gain relevant experience, Dr. Shumba set up on-campus computer research internships. Last year, she also took a group of college students on an all-expenses-paid trip to Florida’s Grace Hopper Celebration, a major annual conference for women in technology. Six students returned to campus with internship 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 at Tata Consultancy Services, a technology company, last summer. Last fall at the conference, she attended an information session by Eli Lilly, the drug giant. That led to an internship interview.

“I have a passion for data, and I just started talking about how I want to explore as many areas as I can with my computer science degree,” said Ms. Rockefeller, 21. “The next day I got a call from one of the recruiters who put me on the phone told me I got the internship.”

This year, Adobe started for itself internship program with Bowie State, focusing on cybersecurity. The internships are part of a larger effort by the company to prepare more black and Latino students for engineering careers.

This summer, a dozen Bowie State students will be joining Adobe as cybersecurity interns. This qualifies the Bowie students for full-time employment at Adobe upon graduation, along with hundreds of other summer interns at the company.