Last year, HelloFresh launched its first ever Women in Tech Scholarship. HelloFresh has always been committed to supporting the professional and personal development of women in technology. In order to lower the entry barriers to kick-off a career in tech, we decided to launch a scholarship. The scholarship included a 3-6 month internship in our technology team in Berlin, and subsequently the opportunity to receive a full-time job at HelloFresh. In order to support studies and living costs, an amount of 10,000 EUR was granted to the candidate who successfully completed her internship and received and accepted a full-time working offer. 

The program was specifically designed for women with STEM degrees, looking to pursue their careers in Technology. Our goal was to provide applicants the opportunity to have an impact on one of the fastest growing technology companies in Europe.

Tailor-made internships to address individual strengths

In order to promote the Women in Tech Scholarship, HelloFresh partnered with leading Universities across Europe. Amongst other steps, the application process included a short video statement presenting a special project the applicant was particularly proud of. Successful candidates were then matched to projects within the Tech organisation. The idea was to create tailor-made internships, taking individual backgrounds into consideration, in order to proactively address and support applicant's strengths.

The recipient of this scholarship was Taliana Herrera. Taliana has a background in cognitive neuroscience and electronic engineering and was looking to pursue her career in technology. For the first half of her 6 month part-time internship she worked with the Data Platform team and continued to work with the Data Science team during the second half - both departments were specifically chosen to suit her capabilities and goals. 

“Because of my background in cognitive neuroscience, I really wanted to understand how machine learning models and predictions worked outside of University and how they can impact customer behaviour. Starting my rotation with the Data Platform team got me out of my comfort zone and helped me learn about data storage and infrastructure. Knowing where and how we stored and processed data was important for the second half of my internship, where I joined the Data Science Team”, Taliana remembers.  

Committing to personal and professional development

For the duration of her internship, Taliana was paired with an experienced female leader from the Tech organisation, who took on the role as her mentor. “Everybody was super helpful and I was paired with mentors who guided me through the projects and showed me best practices. Egoless environment is a key part of the HelloFresh DNA and you could really see how the teams at HelloFresh operated that way,” Taliana continues.  

Following her internship, Taliana commenced her first full-time job as a Junior Data Scientist with the Marketing Analytics team and is maintaining and building predictive models of customer behaviour to benefit the strategies of the CRM team. 

For HelloFresh the Women in Tech Scholarship presented a perfect opportunity to win high performing female students who are looking to get in at the ground level of their career and to help them grow their careers at the scale that HelloFresh operates at. We will be re-launching our Women in Tech Scholarship in 2021 We're continuing to explore new ways to bring talented women in tech into HelloFresh, so stay tuned for more news on these exciting efforts in 2021.