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Reading time: 2 minutesBrian Shu and Roma Malasarte
Two University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa students participated in a paid summer internship program with Hyundai Card, one of South Korea’s leading financial and data science companies.
Brian Shu and Roma Malasarte
Brian Shu, a senior majoring in information and computer sciences (ICS), and Roma Malasarte, who completed her bachelor of science in ICS in summer 2025, spent six weeks in June and July 2025 working within Hyundai Card’s digital business organization in Seoul. The company, a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Group, is known for its innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), data platforms and global software development. Each participant received a monthly stipend of about $1,500 plus company-provided housing.
Shu and Malasarte worked on Hyundai Card’s data science team, contributing to a project using retrieval-augmented generation, an AI framework that improves the performance of large language models by enabling them to search databases for more accurate and relevant results.
“Working at the company and also living in South Korea for those six weeks was the highlight of the whole internship because I would have never thought I would actually get to live there for that span of time,” Malasarte said. “I learned a lot from the company, and I met a lot of people, such as the leaders in the company. Also exploring the city was really nice.”
Building friendships, opening opportunities
A memorable part of the internship for Shu and Malasarte was collaborating closely with interns from Korea, which allowed them to build friendships and gain valuable cross-cultural teamwork experience. Both interns said they were already interested in pursuing a career in data science or AI-related fields, and this experience confirmed it.
“This internship has opened up opportunities for my career not only in the United States but also made me aware of possibilities globally,” Shu said. “The most valuable skills and lessons I learned were how to interact and communicate with colleagues from different backgrounds. I think this stems from language differences, as Korean has a more polite form of speech that people usually use with colleagues and strangers. I became more mindful of my tone, choice of words and body language to ensure my communication was respectful and effective.”
“It really did strengthen my interest in data, and I still want to continue learning and working with data because it has a lot of insights that could lead to innovation in the future, which I think is super important,” Malasarte said. “I definitely want to contribute to that and hopefully one day own my own product and lead a team as well.”
Shu and Malasarte will present their internship experiences and project work at Hyundai Card during the State of AI in Hawaiʻi–Hawaiʻi Tech Days Kick-off Event on September 10, from noon to 2 p.m. at the Walter Dods, Jr. RISE Center. UH and Hyundai Card are planning to offer this internship again in summer 2026. More information will be announced at a later date.
The internships were part of a growing partnership between UH and Hyundai Card, offering students immersive professional experiences in one of Asia’s most dynamic tech-driven industries.
The Department of Information and Computer Sciences is housed in UH Mānoa’s College of Natural Sciences.
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