During my internships The Opportunity Hub really supported me every step of the way, whether that was financially, navigating corporate life, which is something that I didn't have experience with, and none of my friends or family back home had any experience with. Being able to do that I think really helped me stand out at my internships. My name's Anthony Benjamin Castelucci.
I'm a computer science major from Niles, Michigan. Growing up in Niles, very small town, I was one of probably five, maybe people of color in my graduating class. We were definitely low income. Part of the reason why I come to Michigan was such a big deal for me because of the Go Blue guarantee. Going into my freshman year of high school I had the opportunity to apply to a math and science center program.
That was a really big deal for me because I thought it would be something that really made me stand out when it came to my application to Michigan and I ended up getting waitlisted. I was 31st out of 30 people that summer. It was really upsetting, but I was really prepping for high school in general and then ended up making it in off the waitlist and because of that, I was able to take a lot of different classes that I didn't have the opportunity to take at my home school, specifically programing classes. And then when it came to applying to Michigan, I was really excited and ended up getting deferred. Through that semester, in-between when I got deferred, I actually got like the highest GPA I had in high school the entire time. But once I did get in, there definitely was a sense of, like, imposter syndrome.
I'm like, “Do I belong here?” I was really worried that, you know, maybe I just got lucky or maybe I'm not really supposed to be here, but I tried to keep that same strong will and just really took every opportunity and really made the most of it as I could. When I first found out about The Opportunity Hub, there were two main resources that I found that I thought would be extremely helpful to where I was in my career at that point.
The first one being the LSA Internship Scholarship, basically took care of my housing for the summer during my internship. And then the other thing I was coupled with that was a class that we took during the internship where basically every few weeks we reflected on our internship where we were as opposed to where we wanted to be. A lot of different opportunities on, for example, crafting the work that you did in your résumé, talking about how you delivered value. It was a good practice for talking about technical topics to a non-technical audience and just being really mindful about my internship and what I wanted to get out of it. This past summer at NVIDIA, I had a couple projects, but the main one was essentially taking some machine learning frameworks that NVIDIA has developed and used them to build an internal business application. The work with a super interesting to me, super impactful to the company, worked with other engineers and data scientists that were just the greatest mentors I could ask for.
I grew a lot and had a lot of fun doing it. Having The Opportunity Hub’s support, mainly in the form of the internship scholarship as well as the reflection course, really just set me up for success. I was really able to be super communicative with my manager and my surrounding team, particularly in my final presentations and my one on one about feedback.
It really helped me so much so that I ended up getting a full-time job offer for almost a year out. I'm super excited to graduate. It's been, it's been a long four years. I’m really just proud I took advantage of the resources I had. I don't think I could have really done any more, worked any harder. So the fact that from my work, this was where I ended up, I really couldn't be prouder.
