Faizan Raza
MALVERN, Pa. — After a tough coding assessment and having several rounds of interviews with the hiring team, Penn State graduate student Muhammad Faizan Raza was still waiting to hear whether he had gotten a summer internship at cloud cybersecurity firm Zscaler, based in San Jose, California.
Raza followed up with the recruiter to ask for their decision. That’s when the recruiter told him they still needed time to process a massive number of candidates — 14,000 applications for just 30 internship spots.
Knowing how competitive summer internships could be for international students like him, Raza had been applying for them even before he arrived in the U.S. last fall to begin his master of science in data analytics at Penn State Great Valley.
“Penn State stood out to me because of its strong reputation, rigorous curriculum, and the unique combination of technical and project-based learning opportunities that align with my long-term career goals,” Raza said.
Great Valley’s career services office helped Raza optimize his resume with keywords and connected him with career fairs where he refined his pitch to recruiters. The career services office also organized a panel discussion featuring international students who had completed internships and who shared their advice on the process. Following their guidance, Raza kept up a steady pace with his internship search, checking job sites frequently for new postings and submitting hundreds of applications over the course of eight months.
Last winter, Raza received internship offers from two companies, one in the insurance industry and another in the entertainment industry. But he said his first choice was to work in a tech-focused company like Zscaler, learning to use cutting-edge tools. The Zscaler internship involved software engineering, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data engineering, all skills that Raza said were highly in demand and that resonated with what he was learning at Great Valley.
Last March, about two months after Raza had begun the extensive interview process with Zscaler, the recruiter offered him the internship.
“I was over the moon,” Raza said. “I wouldn’t have imagined that I’d be on the West Coast, working with some of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley. When I looked back, it felt like a very insurmountable thing. But while I was in the process, I just thought, ‘I’m only focusing on the next round.’”
Raza spent the summer working at Zscaler, which processes more than 500 billion daily transactions to help protect organizations against threats and describes itself as the national leader in cloud cybersecurity. Raza and another intern collaborated on a primary project of designing and implementing an AI-powered automation service using model context protocol, or MCP, a cutting-edge framework that connects AI systems with data sources, providing the entire context of databases in real time that offers in-depth context and consequently yields better results than legacy integrations.
“The project-driven courses that we have in our degree helped me immensely in this internship,” Raza said. His courses in deep learning, natural language processing, data mining and more included projects that helped him practice outlining a plan and working with a team to execute it.
Because this automation project was new, Raza said, he and his fellow intern often had to delve into creative and unexplored frameworks.
“There was not a fixed recipe,” Raza said. Despite these challenges, he and his teammate completed their project.
“We were successfully able to deploy this into staging and then production, so they are actually using this system right now. So that is a big achievement,” Raza said. While some internships focus on completing basic proof-of-concept deliverables, he said, he felt a sense of accomplishment at creating a production-ready, enterprise-scale system that reduced his team’s workload dramatically.
“This was the highlight moment that I had during my entire internship,” Raza said. “People were saying, ‘It is giving us these results, it is helping us with our work.’” He estimated that the Zscaler team had to spend considerable time on various data processing tasks before, but the MCP system intelligently automated 90% of this work, cutting the time that the team initially had to spend. Now the team could simply review the final output to check for errors or hallucinations and make sure that everything is correct.
At the end of his internship, Raza presented his work to Zscaler executives, and his work was well received, he said. Raza noted that many Silicon Valley startups are increasing automation through MCP, and he thinks MCP-related AI and machine learning engineering jobs will be in high demand in the next few years.
“Working on this cutting-edge stuff will really help me in my career,” Raza said. He added that he feels lucky to have gained exposure and had a lot of opportunities to build professional connections.
“I really want to work in this area, because this is where a lot of innovation is happening,” he said. “What motivates me most is the intersection of technology and impact: the idea that with the right data and tools, we can uncover insights that lead to meaningful change. AI in particular excites me because it combines mathematics, computing and human creativity and has the potential to redefine how we work, learn and connect as a society.”
