Learning by Doing

When Helena Tesfaye started her micro-internship at event management software startup Goodshuffle, she found a friendly and familiar face in Abril Arias (B.S. ‘24, computer science).

Tesfaye, a sophomore computer science major, spent three weeks interning with Goodshuffle over winter break as part of Break Through Tech’s Sprinternship program, which launched in 2022 at UMD to propel more women and nonbinary students into tech careers. First- and second-year computing students are matched with host organizations in the D.C. area to spend three weeks immersed in their workplace cultures while tackling assigned business challenges. 

Mentoring the Next Generation

Sprinterns ordering lunch with Abril Arias. Image courtesy of Helena Tesfaye.

When Tesfaye and her fellow Sprinterns started, they met Arias, who worked with Goodshuffle for UMD’s first cohort of Sprinterns in 2022. During that time, Arias and her former Sprintern team—senior computer science major Mary Redpath, Veda Singireddy (B.S. ‘24, computer science) and Joyce Tijani (B.S. ‘22, computer science)—built a front-end app for warehouse fulfillment workers to manage inventory. Three years later, Arias mentored a new generation of Sprinterns as a full-time software engineer at Goodshuffle.

“Abril was like our big sister,” Tesfaye said. “We would always go to her first if we ran into an error or if there was something we didn’t know. She also talked with us about her time at UMD, her other internships and how she came to Goodshuffle full-time.”

From the beginning of their Sprinternship, Arias encouraged the Sprinterns to speak up, ask questions and get to know software engineers during group meetings they called ‘coffee chats.’

“I pushed them to ask questions of the team because that’s something I struggled with when I was a Sprintern,” Arias said. “I was so proud to see how each of them grew in confidence in just three weeks.”

As the Sprinterns met more Goodshuffle employees, they “unlocked” new resources and guidance for their project. 

“After we went to a coffee chat with one of the engineers, we would joke that we’d unlocked them as a character,” Tesfaye said, “because the next time we ran into an error, we would go to them instead of bothering Abril again. Eventually, we made it around to the whole product team with our questions.”

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