by Sophia Congdon
While many of our ILS students pursue internships at a varying number of locations, some are lucky enough to be scouted by international airlines. This is how Melaina Updike, a 2025 information science graduate, began working with United Airlines. As the two-time president of Luddy’s Women in Computing Organization, Melaina was selected to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration, an international conference that brings together the world’s most extraordinary women in tech and celebrates their achievements.
While there, Melaina’s impressive achievements caught the attention of United Airlines, and they asked her to apply for a summer internship. Just one day after interviewing, she was offered a position on the design system team for summer 2024. As a Digital Tech User Experience Intern, most of Melaina’s work was focused on the customer-facing user interface. Her days were spent collaborating with her fellow teammates and other design teams to introduce new features to the app, such as tap-to-pay.
Through this internship, Melaina discovered just how much she enjoyed team-based projects and is now interested in pursuing a product management role. True to the information science spirit, she loves puzzles and solving problems. While working with others can be challenging, Melaina felt supported by her supervisors and fellow colleagues and emphasized that she enjoyed working in a professional environment stating that they “trusted that I did have the education that I needed to be there.”
After completing her undergraduate degree in informatics in just three years, Melaina joined the accelerated 4+1 program, ultimately finishing both her undergraduate degree and master’s degree in only four years. Her informatics degree provided her with a solid background in coding that allowed her to further study designing systems and data analysis. According to Melaina, “user centered thinking is the epitome of information science.” After graduation, Melaina plans on returning to United Airlines, where she has been offered a fulltime position in their Early Career Digital Learning Program. This introductory program allows new employees to try out several different departments over the course of two years, thus widening the breadth of their experience and company knowledge. Once completed, Melaina is guaranteed a permanent position working in a field she loves.