Thought Leadership

Izeth first got involved with Break Through Tech AI at UCLA in the summer of 2023. After attending a Zoom information session for Break Through Tech, Izeth knew she wanted to apply. As a female in a male-dominated field, she loved the opportunity offered to underrepresented communities and was looking for a change.

This August, we were thrilled to welcome more than 500 exceptional women and non-binary college students from 36 universities nationwide to our Bridge to AI Studio event at Cornell Tech in NYC. Their experience was enriched by the presence and keynote address of an extraordinary voice and a foremost authority on Artificial Intelligence: Allie K. Miller.

The best way to understand the shape and power of Break Through Tech’s work is to hear from the people who are part of it — from the young women participating in our innovative programs, to the leaders who host those programs inside their organizations and the team members who run our programs in cities around the country and online. Meet Chu Huang, director of Break Through Tech AI at MIT, a collaboration with MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, home to one of the world’s top-ranked computer science programs and pioneers of breakthrough research in computing and artificial intelligence. Now entering its second year at this location, the program serves diverse undergraduate women and non-binary students from across Greater Boston; between the thriving and historic academic presence in the city and the dozens of startups emerging, it’s a place with lots of students where the tech landscape is evolving every day.

Break Through Tech’s AI program —which spans NYC, LA, Boston, and which is available virtually for students outside those regions — helps college women and nonbinary students gain the skills and build the portfolios they need to better prepare them to secure jobs in the fastest-growing areas of tech: data science, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly for Black, Latina, Indigenous, low-income, first-generation, and other marginalized communities, the barriers to entering AI loom large. We are here to change that.

Sprinternships™ are paid micro internships that represent an innovative approach to the persistent lack of gender diversity in the tech sector. The program bridges the gap between college and careers for a racially and economically diverse group of undergraduate women and non-binary students, who face unique barriers to entry into this fast-growing field.