AI program aims to break barriers for female students
Over the last 10 months, Chelsea Prudencio, a junior at Baruch College in Manhattan, got a crash course in artificial intelligence through a new program for lower-income Latina and Black young women majoring in computing.
As part of the program, called Break Through Tech AI, Prudencio completed an intensive class developed by Cornell Tech faculty members with input from a few tech executives. She threw herself into a student AI project for Pfizer to create heart disease prediction models. And she was mentored by a cybersecurity executive at Citigroup on how to ace technical job interviews.
These are the kinds of important learning and career opportunities that can help computing majors land jobs in fast-moving fields like AI and data science. But students like Prudencio, who attend public colleges not known for top computing programs, often face challenges gaining access to them.
“I was never made aware of health tech before my project with Pfizer,” said Prudencio, 20, who works part time at a tennis center. Now she hopes to pursue a career in health AI. “This is a lot more fulfilling, I personally think, because you’re building models that could potentially save lives.”
Break Through Tech is at the forefront of universityled efforts to reduce obstacles to tech careers for underrepresented college students, including lowerincome Latina and Black young women. The new AI program, the largest of its kind in the United States, takes a novel approach in a tech industry whose recruiting criteria – technical interviews, hackathon wins, internal employee referrals, previous internships – often advantage wealthier students at top universities. It aims to help lower-income students, many of whom have parttime jobs on top of their schoolwork, learn AI skills, develop industry connections and participate in research projects that they can discuss with job recruiters.
Hosted and supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; UCLA; and Cornell Tech, the AI program is free. It is intended primarily for students attending public institutions – like campuses of California State University, City University of New York and the University of Massachusetts systems – or minority-serving institutions such as historically Black colleges.
Participants take an online summer course in the basics of machine learning – that is, AI systems that teach themselves to detect patterns in data sets. The students, who receive stipends of $2,000, are also assigned career mentors from institutions like Columbia University and Accenture. They work on student AI challenges set up by employers that include Google, Jpmorgan Chase and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
This year, students also participated in a semesterlong competition to develop AI models to distinguish tens of thousands of digitized images of plant specimens belonging to the New York Botanical Garden, one of the world’s premier collections of plants, from other kinds of images like insect photographs. The winning models achieved 99% accuracy or higher. Emily Sessa, director of the botanical garden’s herbarium, said the students’ work could ultimately help botanists more effectively track the impact of climate change on specific plants over time.
“I loved working on the code and seeing the results,” said Sabreen Shigri, a computer engineering major at Stony Brook University on Long Island. Her student team, called the Foxgloves, took third place in the competition. “I thought it was cool that we
could use AI to help the environment.”
A few weeks ago, 150 students who had just completed the AI program traveled to the botanical garden, in the Bronx, for a graduation event that included a scavenger hunt to find real flora and fauna.
One of them was Saliha Demir, 20, a senior at the New York Institute of Technology on Long Island.
“I went in with almost no experience,” Demir said of the AI program. Now, for her senior project, she has developed AI models to identify foods that meet more than a dozen kinds of dietary restrictions, such as gluten-free diets or halal food prepared according to Islamic dietary rules.
“We’re trying to make an AI that can distinguish whether a food is halal,” she said.
This summer, Demir has an internship in mobile computing at a business software company.
Break Through Tech’s approach seems to be working, at least in one important measure: paid tech internships, a crucial career step that can lead to full-time job offers.
Last year, for instance, only 36% of graduating college seniors nationwide reported having had a paid internship, according to data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, an organization for recruiters and college career advisers. By contrast, of the nearly 150*
students who completed the AI program over the past two years, Break Through Tech said it had placed 82% in paid internships at employers including Accenture, Amazon, Fidelity, Google, Mass General Hospital and Microsoft.
In other words, the AI program is not trying to reform elitist tech industry recruiting practices. It is conferring prestige credentials from elite institutions like Cornell and MIT on students from other schools to help get them get hired in tech jobs.
“These students are not in schools with well-known names or from families that can open doors,” said Judith Spitz, executive director of Break Through
Tech. “We are just giving students the opportunity to show what they are capable of.”
Computer science remains a heavily maledominated field. In 2022, men accounted for nearly 78% of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer science, while Latina and Black women combined earned just 2% of the bachelor’s degrees, according to an annual report by the Computing Research Association on universities with doctoral programs in the field. Likewise, at some large tech firms, only a tiny percentage of computer programmers and software engineers are Latina or Black women.
In 2016, Spitz, a former Verizon executive, started an initiative at Cornell Tech to tackle gender disparities. Now known as Break Through Tech, that program offers short-term, paid tech internships to help computing students gain workplace experience and industry connections.
In 2022, Break Through Tech began an effort focused on broadening access to AI careers. It received $26 million in funding from donors, led by Pivotal Ventures, an investment company started by Melinda French Gates.
The effort is rapidly growing. In April, nearly 400 participants graduated from the AI program. For the upcoming academic year, Break Through Tech has accepted nearly 1,000 students.