Software engineering student Alyamama Abdo has always had a pretty good sense of what drives her. She’s been interested in tech for a long time, and since her senior year of high school, she has been active with Girls Who Code, a national organization dedicated to shrinking the gender gap in computer science. Abdo is also really interested in policy and the law, something she attributes, in part, to the influence of her grandfather, who had a career in the legal field.
Up until fairly recently, Abdo assumed she would have to choose one subject or the other when it came to picking a direction for her career. But a class with recently retired Philosophy Professor and Chancellor Emeritus Daniel Little gave her a new way of framing things. During a class project, she ended up digging into the relationships between tech, medicine and the law, and discovered how interconnected these subjects really are in today’s world. This was also around the time public debates over artificial intelligence started to heat up, and she says she ended up going down an “insane rabbit hole” regarding AI policies. “Every state doesn’t even have the same data privacy policies, and consumers in the U.S. have a lot fewer protections compared to the E.U.,” Abdo says. “I remember one day I was on a website I use to find outfits. And one of their cookie notifications said something about ‘selling your data to third parties.’ And it was right there. It wasn’t in the fine print. It was in big bold letters. And I just started researching more and realized how much technology policies affect people.”
Combining her interests in tech and the law suddenly started to seem way more logical. At first, Abdo assumed this would probably mean going to law school and then working for the government. But then another opportunity got her thinking about a different path. In summer 2024, through Girls Who Code, she participated in a “work prep” session with Accenture, a global consulting firm, where she got to interact with people who work for the company and learn about what they do. As it turns out, one of Accenture's bread-and-butter services is IT consulting, which often involves helping organizations and companies craft policies and strategies related to their uses of technology. She liked what she heard and decided to apply for a summer internship with the company in Dallas.
It’s difficult to overstate what a good experience the Accenture internship was. Her official position was security consulting analyst, which might give you an impression that Abdo was sitting in a cubicle, sort of lonely, working on a computer, doing unglamorous tasks that helped the company boost the bottom line by a few pennies. Quite the contrary, Abdo got to work directly on a complex project involving a major telecom company that had recently sold one of its key entertainment assets. This required detangling their once-integrated security environments. “We had to think about how to create a security infrastructure for each company, while keeping their data secure and making sure they could defend against cyberattacks,” Abdo explains. Moreover, she says she got to participate in the project from the ground up. “My manager had us involved in every sort of meeting — even when she was meeting with executives and they were telling us what they liked or didn’t like about the plan," she says. "So that was huge to see how a system is born from the very beginning — and also to see how many individuals are needed to contribute to a project. Like, we had software engineers, security people, project managers and they all had to work together to pull it off.”
Abdo was also pretty struck with the company’s culture. As an intern, she says you sort of wonder how seriously people are going to take you. But right from the start, staff were inviting her and the other interns out to lunch to pick their brains and asking them to tag along for professional development trainings. She also loved that the company had so many employee resource groups, which she likens to student organizations on a college campus. “I was joking with my friends that once I graduate, it’s going to be really hard for me to quit student organizations, but now I have ERGs! So that was pretty great, and I got pretty involved in the Muslim ERG and the Women in Tech and Girls Who Code ERG while I was there,” she says.
Her summer in Dallas was also her first time living away from home. Overall, Abdo enjoyed the independence, but the experience definitely helped clarify what her family means to her. First off, having to cook her own meals (including searching for Halal ingredients in Dallas) and handle all the cleaning in her apartment definitely gave her a new appreciation for her mom, who handles a lot of that labor for her family. “I seriously didn’t know you had to clean the dishwasher. I guess I thought they just magically cleaned themselves," she says, smiling. She also got really homesick at times. As the second oldest of five kids, she’s used to doing a lot for her younger siblings, and it was hard to be away from them. Midway through the internship, her mom also got some not-so-great health news, which made it hard to be 1,200 miles from home.
In the end, Abdo says one of her biggest takeaways from the experience is just how much it helped her clarify what she wants from her future — and also how it’s sometimes hard to put a life together that gives you everything all at once. At the conclusion of the internship, she got a full-time offer from Accenture in Dallas. Given how much she loved working there, that would be a dream. But because she’d have to relocate, she decided to turn it down. At this point in her life, she wants to be close enough to family where she doesn’t have to help mediate her siblings’ disputes about who took whose toy over the phone. And she really wants to be there for her mom this year. If all goes well, Abdo’s current spot on the wait list for Accenture’s Detroit office, earned through her high level of performance and the connections she made in Dallas, will turn into an offer post-graduation.
Even if the stars don’t align perfectly, Abdo says she’s still really grateful for the lessons that came with this internship experience. “I think I just realized what I enjoy and didn’t enjoy, and that’s something everybody should experience,” she says. “Because how else do you grow as a person? I know someone else who interned out of state this summer; she was at a health tech company in Chicago, and she loved it so much. She learned a lot about herself, and now she knows she wants to go back to Chicago after graduation. That’s exactly what it means to be a college student. You put yourself out there and see what you like and you don’t like. Because it’s easier to figure that out while you’re still young, because you don’t have as much to lose. It’s your time to make mistakes and learn from those experiences.”
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Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Matthew Stephens.
