Proponents say that artificial intelligence will create more jobs than it displaces. For one University of Georgia business student, that’s already true.
Anna Katherine Black, a rising fourth-year honors student studying finance, turned a class project into a new feature pitch for one of her favorite apps and then into a part-time job offer.
Black started noodling with Claude Code for projects in Management Information Systems
Department Head Jerry Kane’s emerging technology class. The course, she said, was based on exploration and experimentation with AI platforms and part of her coursework to earn her Certificate in Artificial Intelligence from Terry College of Business.
Her first-class project was to create a bot to help her improve friends’ resumes, something that had previously taken her two hours at a time. Then Black created a bot to help her prepare for her upcoming internship at Berkley Research Group by creating a digest of targeted finance news that she’ll need to know when she starts.
But she needed to go further. She started emailing her favorite apps to see if they’d be willing to talk with her about AI and how they saw their apps developing. She sent out 20 cold emails and heard back from the engineering team from Locker — a Chrome extension that allows shoppers to build online fashion wish lists and keep track of products they want to buy. Black was excited because she and her friends use Locker a lot.
She spent 30 minutes talking with a senior engineer at Locker about the future of AI and fashion and what Black and her friends wanted from the app. After they hung up, Black spent the next week making a prototype of her desired feature in Claude Code.
“I’m a finance major; I’m not an engineer at all,” Black said. “But I went as far as I could on my laptop and essentially built the feature I wanted on my hard drive. It only showed up when I used Locker on my laptop, but I sent them a video of how the feature worked and sent them the code as well.”
That led to more conversations with product engineers and Locker’s CEO, which turned into a job offer.
“Thirty minutes after I got off the phone, they sent an email saying they decided I would be an asset to their team,” Black said. “My official title is AI implementation intern.”
The feature Black created was not perfect, but it showed the team at Locker how quickly it could be tried using AI. Claude Code was creating a sketch for their project engineers to build on and fine tune. The ability to see that vision and willingness to play was what she was bringing to Locker.
“They needed somebody on their team with some expertise and optimism regarding AI,” Black said. “I think they appreciated how I was able to build something that wasn’t necessarily ready for use in the app, but it was good enough to test the idea. Now the engineers can look at the code and see how they can use it to create the feature.”
Black was able to negotiate timing that allows her to take on her Berkley Research internship this summer and then work part-time for Locker starting next August.