UC San Diego Artificial Intelligence Students Gained Experience in Summer Internships
UC San Diego's first undergraduate artificial intelligence students combined their theoretical knowledge with practice by interning in fields such as biotechnology and finance during the summer term.
The first cohort of undergraduate artificial intelligence students at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) had the opportunity to apply the skills they acquired during summer internships after completing their freshman year.
As UC San Diego welcomed its second cohort of artificial intelligence majors this autumn, students from the inaugural group returned from summer jobs and internships in diverse fields such as biotechnology, finance, and software engineering. In the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings published in September 2026, UC San Diego ranked as the 8th best undergraduate artificial intelligence program in the country.
The Jacobs School of Engineering, in collaboration with the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing, launched the undergraduate artificial intelligence major in 2025. Three students from the inaugural group shared their internship experiences: Leena Banga worked as a product management intern at Synergie Tech Solutions, Daniel Zhang worked as an artificial intelligence/software engineering intern at Protillion Bioscience, and Nicole Fong worked as an artificial intelligence/machine learning intern at ChakraTech while also serving as a Google Student Ambassador.
Sources
- today.ucsd.edu · Link