Our latest news and updates

In this edition:

Empowering Futures in Tech - learn about our Mentors and Students
Get Involved - Break Through Tech AI and the Sprinternship™
Real World Projects - learn what our students have been working on
Partner Showcase - American Express

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Mentors are valued volunteers at the heart of what we do to support career readiness at Break Through Tech. They work alongside students and guide them through discovery, arming them with new skills and self-confidence. In this edition, we are thrilled to showcase a compliance officer at Citadel, one of the world’s leading alternative investment firms: Sofia Kahn.

Guided by her academic knowledge of AI for business and combined with her industry experience, Sofia is focused on helping students transition smoothly into their professional careers by nurturing career readiness. She provides comprehensive support in preparing job applications, honing interview skills, and assisting mentees in confidently articulating their viewpoints. Her mentorship is a testament to mentors’ critical role in academic and professional development.

Read more about her story and how she lifts as she climbs here.

Also, this month, we kicked off Women’s History Month with a crowd of Break Through Tech students who joined us on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to watch the opening bell. They also participated in a morning of talks, panels, and speed mentoring in none other than the Muriel Siebert Hall - a boardroom honoring the first woman to have a seat on the Exchange and called by Time Magazine “The Woman Who Kicked Down Wall Street’s Doors”!

Watch this interview from the event here.

Whether you work in technology, business services, healthcare, energy, retail/e-commerce, travel, manufacturing, or another industry, we welcome you to our partner community.

Learn more about our signature programs and other ways to get involved with Break Through Tech. For example:

Break Through Tech AI Studio gives you access to early tech talent in the fastest-growing area of technology. Partners like you design a Challenge Project based on a real-world problem you aim to solve. Our students major in computer science at their host universities and have earned an additional Machine Learning Foundations Certificate from Cornell Tech.

Read more about AI Studio here .

The Sprinternship™, our longest-running program, gives you access to a talented, entry-level tech pipeline while increasing employee engagement and satisfaction.

The Sprinternship™ is a micro-internship experience at your company (in-person or virtually) for 2-3 weeks during a school’s academic break. The students work in teams alongside your tech team with impressive results and deliver innovative perspectives to real-world company challenges. Read about some of their remarkable work here.

If you’d like information about these or a custom program for your organization, watch our short informational video or contact us at GET INVOLVED .

So far this year, more than 750 students have completed a Sprinternship™ or AI program nationwide. During their experiences, students work on real-life projects guided by their host companies.

One example of these projects included collaborating with MathWorks to improve autonomous vehicle safety. This Sprinternship™ project enabled students to gain hands-on experience working on a business problem and challenged them to dive into the complex world of #computervision. You can read more about this project and the students and advisors involved here.

Another groundbreaking project involves Break Through Tech AI's collaboration with the New York Botanical Garden on climate science and artificial intelligence. This program engages 500 students guided by software engineers and volunteers from Google. The initiative aims to advance biodiversity research by deploying machine learning to classify plant specimen images from NYBG's vast collection. Read more about this project here.

American Express Offers Jobs and Internships to 25 Break Through Tech Students.

The students spent three weeks at the company as part of our micro-internship program, the Sprinternship™.

"We firmly believe that innovation thrives on diverse skill sets, backgrounds, and experiences," said Donna Peters, Vice President of Technology at American Express.