Summer Internship at The World Bank

Over the summer, 8 students and 3 alumni from CMU-Africa were selected for The World Bank’s Young Women in Information Technology (WITY) Program in Washington D.C. The program aims to encourage young women in IT to apply and join the world bank work force as IT professionals. They were successfully recruited from among 44 others from around the world. In Africa, only 12 were selected for the summer internship program, 11 of them being women from CMU-Africa. 

They worked in different departments in the Information and Technology Solutions section of the World Bank which includes enterprise applications, networking and infrastructure, data analytics, operations, finance and robotic process automation. The internship exposed them to different technologies used by the institution and offered them the opportunity to network with many professionals in the industry. During their time in D.C. the students and alumni visited and interacted with students from the Carnegie Mellon University Washington Semester Program (CMU/WSP).

“It was a great experience. I was working on completely new technologies. I feel that CMU prepared me for this because it stretched me to the point that I approached any task that would be presented to me with so much confidence,” said Abigail Woolley, who interned in the networking and infrastructure department. Abigail worked on the development and content management of her unit’s intranet website.

Marlise Montcho, the first student from Benin at CMU-Africa, interned in the data analytics department and was the only woman in a team of 11 software engineers. She enjoyed the collegial environment at the World Bank where her teammates were helpful and where her contributions were valued. Her greatest learning point was when she realized that data analytics is an art; presenting findings to non-technical clients is as equally important as writing the code behind it. During her internship, she analyzed and predicted the capacity of the team by building a model using python. She also built an application to estimate the cost of future projects automatically.

 

 “I was particularly impressed by the maturity of the interns in that they were very dependable and needed minimum supervision. Also, I liked how they managed to navigate a large organization like the World Bank in terms of knowing the relevant people to get information from. I would highly recommend the students to employers who are looking to pipeline for potential candidates in the future,” said Daniel Bennett, who was a supervisor in the enterprise department under the application monitoring team.

Two of the alumni were retained and are still working at the World Bank to date.