HWS News
15 July 2026 • ai Across Disciplines, Across Continents
Supported by the Charles H. Salisbury Summer International Internship Stipend, Selina Owino '28 is expanding her professional experience while maximizing companies’ social impact.
As a tech consulting intern with Cape Town-based diiVe Consulting this summer, Selina Owino '28 is contributing to projects that blend business research, data analysis and community impact.
The opportunity is supported by the Charles H. Salisbury Summer International Internship Stipend. The Salisbury stipend has covered Owino’s program fees, flight, travel insurance, food and living expenses while enabling her to strengthen both the technical and client-facing sides of her consulting experience.
A native of Kenya, Owino learned about the internship through a student participant at the NY6 International Student Summit, an annual gathering of international students from the New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium. After completing the same internship the previous summer, the fellow student referred Owino to diiVe Consulting recruiters and helped her prepare for the interview process.
The internship builds on interests Owino has been developing both inside and outside the classroom. A computer science major with a strong interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning, she recently completed an automation externship building AI-powered pipelines to process large mortgage files. Her work involves using optical character recognition, document-processing and language-model technologies to extract and organize information from large collections of documents.
Applying those skills independently, Owino is also developing a machine-learning project that helps small farmers in Kenya identify plant diseases through computer vision while she continues to develop her Python programming and data-analysis skills.
At diiVe, Owino is involved in business research, stakeholder interviews, data analysis and client presentations.
"The internship has been an eye-opener for me," Owino says. "Going in I wasn't sure if I'd be drawn more to the client-facing side of consulting or the number-crunching side. However, the first few weeks have given me more clarity since I have had the opportunity to be immersed in both."
On one project Owino serves as research lead analyzing stakeholder interviews, identifying patterns and helps developing recommendations related to Corporate Social Investment (CSI) — how businesses invest in their communities — and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategies, which evaluate an organization's environmental, social and governance practices.
The internship has also helped her better understand the kind of career she wants after graduation.
"I have come to realize that I am energized by the technical side more — building out a model and being able to trace why the numbers behave the way they do while simultaneously trying to figure out where a business problem is hiding," Owino says.
Top: Selina Owino '28 (left) at diiVe Consulting, a South African consulting firm based in Cape Town.