Meet the NYC Startup Internship Alumni: Subhan Tariq

I’m Subhan, I was born and raised in the Bronx. I graduated from Baruch College last spring as a computer science major. During my time at Baruch, I was a part of many different organizations, including Baruch Association for Information Systems, Google G-SWEP, CUNY Tech Prep, Codepath, and more. I'll be joining IBM as an app developer in September. I expect the work to be highly technical, and I can't wait to upskill as much as possible.

The skills and experiences from the NYC Startup Internship Program are definitely what helped me land the role. Last summer I worked at QuickSlot Health, which is an early-stage health-tech startup that focused on using patient-clinician consultations’ transcriptions to generate AI insights, automate billing, and reduce clinical paperwork.

Since I was one of the only technical people in the startup, I had to adapt and take on more responsibility than I expected. This allowed me to wear many hats and be involved in every stage of the software development cycle. I would often be on calls with the founders to talk about the product to stakeholders, clients, and vendors. I was the first point of contact if clients were experiencing issues and bugs with our software. I would also get weekly feedback from customers about what features were the most useful to them. This allowed me to learn how to speak about technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

I also did traditional software engineering work like building full-stack features. I did everything from designing and building the UI to building a serverless backend using AWS Lambda functions. The task that ended up being the most important in helping me land the IBM role was migrating our Azure cloud infrastructure to the AWS equivalents. This experience allowed me to stand out in my IBM interviews since it was exactly what the team was looking for and was likely the reason I was hired.

I strongly recommend that NYC students apply to this program. Not only do you get hands-on experience that could help open doors to new opportunities, but you also make connections to talented people—whether they’re coworkers, fellow interns, or founders from other startups.

If I had advice to give to those who are applying to this program in the future, I’d say to try to understand what the startup is building and see how your skill set will help them.