Sprinternships with Break Through Tech Chicago and the Amazon Braket quantum computing team

During May 2022, Amazon Web Services hosted its first cohort of students participating in Break Through Tech Chicago’s annual Sprinternship. This is a micro-internship program designed to transform the career trajectories of women (cisgender and transgender) and nonbinary individuals. The program offers these students foundational work experience that prepares them for the tech workforce.

Break Through Tech Chicago and AWS came together to create a micro-internship opportunity for five University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) undergraduate students. Break Through Tech Chicago delivers high-impact programs at UIC that enable more women and nonbinary individuals, especially from underrepresented backgrounds, to pursue an undergraduate education that prepares them to compete for and succeed in tech roles.

At AWS, we strive to be Earth’s best employer, including people of every color, gender, belief, origin, and community. Currently, women only hold about 26% of tech-related roles in the global workforce, according to Gartner research. Partnering with UIC helps us live up to our commitment to opening doors for women and to enhancing diversity while introducing undergraduates to the fascinating world of quantum computing by using Amazon Braket. Amazon Braket is a fully managed service designed to help speed up scientific research and software development for quantum computing. Through the service, the students were able to design and build quantum programs, run them on real quantum computers, and analyze the results.

The participants of the 2022 Sprinternship contributed to one of Amazon Braket’s open-source GitHub projects. Amazon Braket Software Development Engineer Wayne Rasmuss spearheaded the Sprinternship experience. In his own words: “Working with the Sprinternship participants from Break Through Tech was inspiring. We got so much done and learned a lot from each other.” Wayne met with the cohort on a daily basis to troubleshoot obstacles and assist in creating pull requests against Amazon Braket GitHub repositories. As part of the Sprinternship, a range of speakers from the AWS team joined to share their experience and give advice. This included guest speakers giving an introduction to the Julia programming language, an overview of internships at AWS, quantum computing lectures, and career path discussions.

The specific project for the 2022 Sprinternship was to implement features to convert Braket SDK gates to OpenQASM 3.0 gates. OpenQASM is an intermediate representation for quantum computing that lets you describe quantum programs in a way that is device agnostic, so the program can be run on different types of gate-based quantum computers. The conversion between the existing intermediate representation and the OpenQASM representation was selected to give the student a chance to acquire and demonstrate useful skills that they can continue to apply and hone beyond their three-week experience. The students were able to convert 18 of 33 gates during the Sprinternship and the peer-reviewed GitHub contributions are public works that they can reference in their career pursuits going forward.

Alongside other company-driven efforts, partnering with universities and programs like Break Through Tech are essential to increasing diversity in the quantum computing space.

Learn more about internship opportunities for students at Amazon and the Sprinternship through Break Through Tech Chicago.