Ten students from junior secondary schools in Georgetown began a five-week paid internship on Monday July 22, with several private sector Information and Communications Technology (ICT) enterprises in Georgetown
According to a Ministry of Public Telecommunications (MoPT) release, the internship is a direct spin-off of a “Travelling Symposium” that the Ministry conducted last March with an outreach to the St Mary’s, Lodge, Carmel, Queens-town and Charlestown Secondary Schools.
The internship itself is a talent-scouting endeavour with the aim of enlightening the students about the ways they could convert their talents such as drawing, singing, writing or dramatising poetry, into a technological product, whether it is in animation, robotics, gaming, software design or programming.
As an incentive, one student from each of the 5 schools was selected by their teachers for the five-week ICT Internship. These youths have now joined up with the five top-performing students from the 2018/2019 “Guyanese Girls Code” training programme. Over the coming months, the ten interns will have the opportunity to sharpen their computer literacy, their artistic and programming skills while they receive hands-on training on some new technologies from the best minds in the ICT business in Guyana.
The MoPT’s partners in this endeavour which included, Version 75/Nexus Hub; Innovative Systems (InnoSys); Intellect Storm; Tagman Media; and the BrainStreet Group, participated in the school visits along with instructors from the University of Guyana’s computer department, the Government Technical Institute, and the Guyana Industrial Training Centre, and the National Centre for Educational Resource Development.
The interns were visibly excited when the MoPT’s training team visited them on the second day of their attachments. Christiane Sarabo of Charlestown Secondary said that she is looking forward to testing the knowledge she has already acquired on the way to becoming a graphic artist. Sarena Razak, with a year’s training in coding, said she is looking forward to applying the line-by-line coding she has learnt to an actual ICT product; and Annalise Williams, now a graduate of St. Mary’s High, intends to pursue a career in accountancy, utilising computer technology. The intern from Queenstown Secondary, Jeremiah Chapman, has already taught himself the basics of computer hardware repair so he is now able to test and improve those skills while he learns some coding and application, the release added.
