Senior Matt Sankner is grateful for every step that is helping him stand apart from the competition — beginning with an amazing internship experience with BMW Group.
He is thankful his hockey coach recruited him to play for the Cardinals — but it wasn’t just the lure of the ice that brought him to Winona. He says he also chose Saint Mary’s based on its educational offerings, tuition costs, small class sizes, and the beauty of the area.
Next, Sankner credits Saint Mary’s Computer Science Department for introducing him to coding and igniting a passion for the career within him.
“A lot of the world is run on code,” he said. “I didn’t know if I would like it or be good at it, but Assistant Professor (Farhad) Bari, he excited everyone in the class. He brought it to life. That started me on the journey of wanting to be a software engineer.”
Sankner further appreciates Bari for something that helped him secure that internship this past year with BMW.
”He even reviewed many of the exact interview questions I might see,” Sankner said. “BMW asked me an exact question of his, which I aced. He also taught a class where, as part of the curriculum, I made a complex web application that helped me land my first internship at Insulet Corporation before my junior year. I owe him a lot.”
But the internship itself — Sankner earned that one all on his own. He estimates that between September to March of last year he applied to 200 internships. He also studied and prepared for technical interviews. “Interviews aren’t just ‘tell me about yourself;’ they’re behavioral, plus technical, logical problems; it’s a long, arduous process,” he said. “The goal was to get an internship at the best company I possibly could to help set myself apart.”
The work paid off, and he was thrilled to be hired as an artificial intelligence engineer for the BMW Group in Greenville, S.C., between August to December 2024.
“Our job as a team was to bring new innovations to the BMW group, basically research and hack with new tech like virtual reality goggles or generative AI, build proof of concepts and demos for use cases that BMW Group was interested in, occasionally bring some projects fully to production, and give them to different units at BMW, Mini, and Rolls-Royce to use in the factory, office, or whatever application,” he said. “It was a great experience; I learned a ton.”
One of the main projects he worked on was automating the creation of a virtual reality app used for training BMW engineers who worked on assembly and disassembly of BMW cars.
“Originally they were making each version of the app by reading manuals that the app needed and hand-coding the app based on complex relationships between data in those manuals. This was a painstaking and delicate process so I attempted to find out a way that we could use AI to take those manuals and create the code for new versions for us,” he explained. “It was successful: I built an AI powered web application that served as a data pipeline from those manuals to a new version of the app. Our stakeholders and after sales team loved it and are going to keep using it in their workflow.”
Additionally, Sankner worked on some side projects, including building a landing page for an internal coffee club and researching AI wearable technology like smart glasses, which he said expanded the scope of what he may be interested in pursuing long term careerwise.
“BMW has a lot of resources and encouraged me to use them to pursue my interests fully. The internship shaped my résumé how I wanted it to be shaped, because it gave me access to things to hack with and learn about like their expensive GPU servers for testing AI models and their proprietary, in house AI Agents Framework,” Sankner said. “It was also great to learn and be a part of a team in a professional software development lifecycle.”
At the end of his internship, Sankner said BMW ranks their interns on a 5-point scale. A 3 is considered 100 percent, where the intern did the job and completed all tasks. A 5 would mean that the intern went above and beyond, making the business excessive amounts of money. Sankner received a 4.4 score, which he said is one of highest scores he’s heard of.
BMW also asked Sankner to continue working with the company virtually, at 20 hours a week until he graduates this spring.
Sankner said this internship/now part-time job has helped move him in the right direction for his career, and he’s thankful for Saint Mary’s professors who helped him every step of the way, including making it possible for him to take the internship for credit and still graduate on time.
“The Computer Science Department has helped me out a lot,” he said. “In this major, you have to be a self-starter, ace technical interviews, and do a lot of things extracurricularly including getting internships to land a full-time job. No college is going to get you there on its own, and that includes the Ivy League schools,” he said. “But I want to give all the credit in the world to my professors: obviously Bari, who was my primary software engineering professor, but also Dr. Don Heier for his help in making it possible for me to do the internship from a credits standpoint, and assistant professor Matt Klosky, who mentored me, encouraged me, and often pushed me to innovate and build outside of my comfort zone extracurricularly throughout my time at Saint Mary’s. They made this a great student experience.”
