9 Mar 2022
At Bolt, we’ve always believed that women can be a breath of fresh air for the tech field — an industry that has traditionally been heavily male-dominated, with women holding just 25% of jobs in tech. Through our paid internship programme, we aim to help improve those figures dramatically.
Meet our role models — Rahma, Gladys, and Mercy who took part in our internship programme in 2021. To get a better overview of how the internship looked, they shared their thoughts, worries, highlights, and words of encouragement for other women who want to land their dream job tech.
Growing up, Rahma didn’t have any interest in the tech industry. That all changed when she joined the Rails Girls — a Finnish non-profit volunteer community with a mission to introduce as many girls to tech as possible.
When Rahma attended the first Rails Girls event, she was impressed by how the facilitators who were students just like her were sharing their knowledge for free. She immediately knew she wanted to have the same impact on girls who would come after her.
Pursuing a new career path is always challenging, but Rahma’s friends and fellow organisers at the Rails Girls made it easier for her — they became her biggest supporters when she decided to apply for an internship at Bolt.
Rahma did her internship in the Operations team. Among her daily tasks were data analysis, process optimisation and driver onboarding. The program had daily and weekly targets that each intern had to meet and Rahma had an understanding of what kind of skills and knowledge she’ll be gaining. For example, she improved her analytical skills and got an overall understanding of how things are working at Bolt. Oh, and we forgot to mention — Rahma is now a full-time Bolt employee!
Through continuous learning and making her own way in the tech industry, Rahma wants to inspire other young women who are already taking steps or perhaps only just considering getting into the tech industry.
“Seek discomfort — no one has ever achieved anything extraordinary by being comfortable,” says Rahma.
Gladys’ list of achievements is long. She’s a co-founder, a business owner, and also successfully completed her internship at Bolt.
Getting into the tech industry might not have been a question for Gladys. Her mother is an engineer who went back to school to study telecommunications engineering after giving birth to 5 kids and spent 40 years building her career in tech. Gladys’ sister is also working in tech.
Growing up next to these women, Gladys didn’t have any choice — her sister dragged her into a programming course right after high school and explained that their generation will be defined by everything tech.
Gladys saw an internship at Bolt as an opportunity to advance her learning and acquire as many new skills as possible. During the internship, Gladys acquired not only technical skills but also learned how big a role a company culture can play in shaping its employees.
Bolt’s internship is about inclusion and empowering women in tech. We’re choosing to break the bias by smashing the stereotypes about women in STEM fields and showing that it’s possible to become a part of the tech world. So now it’s Gladys’ time to shine!
Mercy is a young techie from Nakuru county who’s now majoring in data science and machine learning. She got interested in the latter during her time as an operations intern at Bolt.
Mercy’s interest in tech has been greatly helped by her continuous and constant interest in learning because tech is a dynamic field. Her majoring in machine learning is not surprising, but rather a natural continuation of her development.
An internship at Bolt was a tech-based opportunity for Mercy that could give her a chance to kick start her career in the tech industry. She became an intern in the operations department and was pleasantly surprised that an internship wasn’t just about assisting with small routine tasks.
Instead, she was assimilated into the team and worked on actual projects, and reported her deliverables the same way any other team member would do. She worked on CLM tasks, did an analysis on existing supply and shared insights with her fellow colleagues, assisted with the lifecycle marketing and customer support tasks.
We’re happy to announce that this year the internship program is returning! Thanks to the great feedback we received from last year’s interns, this year we’re calling all women who’ve been dreaming of a career in tech to apply.
The application process is easy — all you need to do is dedicate 10–15 minutes to answer 5 questions. We’ll be accepting responses up until March 30th, 2022.
