“Never doubt yourself. You are smart enough, you are strong enough, and you deserve to be where you are.” Izeth Torres Reyes illuminates what Break Through Tech offers our students – new opportunities and new confidence as they launch careers in tech. Read more about Izeth’s journey HERE.

Izeth is just one of the 6,000+ young women and non-binary students who have taken advantage of the programs Break Through Tech offers – from our flagship Sprinternship™ to our new AI Studio and more. No one can tell the story of Break Through Tech’s year better than our students. Hear more from students like Nailini, Tomi, Taguhi, Izeth, Mariam, Grace, Izabella, and others on our website HERE.

Break Through Tech AI

The AI Program expanded nationally, increasing student enrollment nearly 3x over the last year. 2023’s cohort includes 510 students from 100+ colleges and universities.

More significantly, 80% of the students who have completed our AI Program in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles over the past two years have successfully landed a summer internship or full-time job in tech, including roles in AI Research, Analytics, Data Engineering, and Data Science. 

Computing Program

Thanks to many of our industry partners who hosted a Sprinternship™. In 2023, Break Through Tech’s Computing Program served 1,672 students across all of its sites, a 35% increase from FY22. 

The Sprinternship™, Break Through Tech’s flagship experiential learning opportunity, allows you to expand your early talent recruitment efforts, boost your diversity strategies, and open a new pathway into paid internships and jobs. And the impact you can make? Based on our data, our students were more than ten times as likely to land a paid summer tech internship with a Sprinternship™ on their resume than without.

This year, more than 500 students completed a Sprinternship™ at 51 host companies. This was a 28% increase from 2022. More than half (57%) were Black, Latina, or first-generation college-goers. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of Sprinterns who applied, received an offer for a paid internship with their host company. 

Watch: 2 minutes about the Sprinternship™ program 

Reply back to this email or click HERE to learn more about our Sprinternship™ program.

In 2023, we engaged with more than 100 industry partners to connect our students with industry-relevant skill development, experiential learning, and mentoring opportunities. With the support of partners like you, here are just a few of the outstanding real-world projects our students completed:

Sprinternships™

• Students at American Express developed a user interface for monitoring platform releases, with the ability to track the list of changes planned within a given release.
• Students at Elevance Health Carelon analyzed and explored data for key insights into past performance and set up reporting and dashboards to track improvements in key performance indicators of a pilot product.
• Students at Microsoft refined an existing Microsoft hackathon project, IQ Engine, which is a React web-app that provides users with a way to store, share, and analyze RF recordings

AI 

• Students built a predictive algorithm for future COVID-19 detection for Pfizer, using NLP and clustering techniques.
• Students analyzed open-source X (Twitter) data for Accenture to identify public reaction and sentiment around a product release.
• Students predicted the arrival probability of customers on the American Express web portal.
• Students predicted for Verizon how much additional network coverage and capacity are needed given expanding network demand and movement.
• For USA for UNHCR, a nonprofit organization that helps to save, protect, and rebuild the lives of millions of refugees, students used email data to predict which supporters are likely to convert to donors.
• Students designed a model for KPMG that predicts how best to electrify our roads and communities to encourage balanced growth across Chicago.

Break Through Tech continues to cultivate national partners that operate in multiple locations – and deepen those partnerships. Two great examples include Verizon and American Express:

• This year we worked with American Express, to scale the Sprinternship™ program across multiple regions and universities. American Express hosted 107 students across NY, DC, Miami and the West Coast to pipeline Sprinterns into their summer internship program at regional office hub locations. This inaugural iteration of a “Pipeline Sprinternship™ Program” resulted in an average of 70% of Amex Sprinterns receiving offers to apply for the Amex Summer Internship, with 90% percent accepting those offers.

• Break Through Tech is partnering with Verizon to launch a two-year Pipeline Sprinternship™ Program that will introduce early-career talent to seven of their office hubs across the country. The program, set to launch its first cohort in January 2024, will include 200 students recruited from 15 universities who are enrolled in a Computer Science or Network Engineering program. 

Expanding the number and depth of our industry partnerships is a win-win: you get access to a diverse talent pipeline, and our students get real-world experience that helps them enter the tech workforce. Over time, we look forward to our alumni being champions, ambassadors, change agents and leaders from within industry to continue the work of bending the curve towards gender equity in tech.