Truist Bank AI Enablement Internship - Competing an Internship (Silver 5 Points) Class of 2028

This summer, I served as a Digital Technology and Innovation intern at Truist Bank. When I first began my job, I felt out of place. I knew that coming into an internship, I wash’t expected to know anything or immediately contribute, but while my fellow interns were doing their first merge requests and working on real features, I was assigned to take notes for the team I worked on. For eight hours a day, I shadowed members of my team, taking notes on projects I knew nothing about. I was constantly confused and scared to ask too many questions because if I did, I would expose myself as an imposter. With my main background being in education (teaching students with learning disabilities and teaching foundational computer science), I wasn’t sure how I could provide value on a technical team.  Once my team got started on their project, I learned that I had been assigned to Truist’s brand new AI enablement team. Their job was to help teams within wholesale payments implement new AI powered solutions to streamline their workflows. My daily task was to take notes for the team. As I did that, my manager assigned me to evaluate ai tool adoption metrics across our division. I identified patterns of tool adoption and presented it to one of our executives, who praised my work. My next step was to propose a plan on how to get more team members using Copilot, so my manager challenged me to create a training plan that would increase adoption. Sudduly I was in my element. I created a framework to teach foundational AI concepts centered around a kitchen analogy. The AI model is your sous chef, the data is the ingredients, and your prompt is the recipe. Through this lens I created a comprehensive 30 minute training and conducted it 3 times to over 1000 total employees at Truist with 91% meeting or achieving the learning goals. I finally realized that I didn’t need to do what I thought I should. While I looked on enviously everyone around me doing hardcore software engineering and data science, I thought that the notes I took and training I made was insignificant. In reality, I was able to impact more of Truist that summer than anyone else. As a computer science major, it’s often individual contributor roles like software engineering, data science, or cybersecurity that’s pushed upon us, and if you don’t fit into one of those roles, it’s hard to see yourself as successful. I thought my experience in education discounted my skills as a computer scientist, when they actually were incredibly valuable, because I empowered hundreds of employees to improve their work.