Meet the NYC Startup Internship Alumni: Maryam Ilyas

Most people never think about what happens on a roof in the middle of winter. I've spent my whole summer thinking about it.

I'm from Queens, New York, and I attend The City College of New York through the Macaulay Honors College program, majoring in computer science. But that's only part of the story. Somewhere in my freshman year, I realized I wasn't interested in picking one lane. Instead, I added minors in international studies, journalism, and management & administration. People always ask why. The honest answer is that I like learning how fields overlap. Those minors taught me to dig past the surface, pay attention to context and perspective, and understand how people actually work together. Computer science may be what I build with; but those other fields are how I discover what's worth building.

That mentality led me to the NYC Startup Internship Program and Floe Inc., a startup working on a problem that stays invisible until it's expensive: ice dams and snow buildup. These quietly cost property owners enormous amounts of money and cause real damage. Floe builds monitoring and automated prevention systems that catch the problem before it becomes one. What I love about it is how physical the stakes are and that the work doesn't stay on a screen.

My work there combines two worlds that don't usually share a desk: cloud engineering and product design. On the engineering side, I'm building SMS alert workflows in Amazon Web Services. This pipeline’s whole purpose is getting a message to a real person in time to matter. On the design side, I'm architecting a field data management system and mapping the user experience in Figma.

On the technical side, I've learned about AWS, data management, and Figma. But the real shift was in how I learned to approach problems in the first place. I used to start with, “How do I build this?” Now I start with, “How should this whole system work, and how does it fit into what already exists?”

The soft skills surprised me even more. I'm naturally the person who hesitates before reaching out, worried the question will sound uninformed, worried I'm taking up someone's time. My mentor, Olivia Frejka from Blackstone, pushed hard against that instinct. She encouraged me to actually talk to the people I was curious about, and I've loved hearing their thinking, their paths, and the advice they were happy to give once I asked.

The days open with a team check-in. Mondays and Fridays are our alignment meetings, where we set priorities at the start of the week and close it out by naming what got done. The rest is a mix: focused design and engineering blocks, working through problems and ideas with teammates, and project check-ins with my boss. I'm one of three software engineering interns. We each own different projects, but we check in with each other constantly, asking for advice, sanity-checking approaches, and learning from each other.

When I look ahead, I want to work at the seam between technology and business. Technical product management is the role that keeps pulling at me, because it demands all the things I've been interested in: engineering fluency, strategy, communication, and the ability to hold a whole system in your head.

And I want to do it here. New York is home. It's also a city where the tech ecosystem is growing fast while sitting right next to finance, media, and everything else. I can't imagine a better place to build.

This summer gave me more than a resume line. It gave me real ownership, mentorship from people who took my questions seriously, and a network of people I admire. My advice to students interested in the NYC Startup Internship Program is that technical skills matter and you should keep building them—but curiosity, initiative, and a willingness to be new at something will carry you further than you think.