UTECH Student Areeba Zafar Wins Japan AI Internship, Tops Global IT Contest

A Jamaican final-year computer science student has broken through a fiercely competitive international pipeline to land a fully funded artificial intelligence placement in Japan, then finished among the highest performers on the programme’s global skills test.

Areeba Zafar, who studies at the University of Technology, Jamaica, joined the November 2025 intake of Internships in Japan for AI and Tech. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry runs the initiative; staffing firm Pasona handles day-to-day management.

She stood alone as Jamaica’s representative in the cohort and was also the only woman chosen from the Latin America and Caribbean bloc. Organisers received more than 14,000 applications worldwide, including 5,231 from Latin America and the Caribbean, yet admitted just 50 participants for the six-week, all-expenses-paid stint.

Zafar went further in the programme’s IT contest, earning S-Rank status and landing inside the top 0.4 per cent of entrants globally. That result secured her the role of lead speaker for the full intern group at the official awards ceremony. Programme officials later featured her work in a case study posted on the initiative’s website.

Before university, she attended St. Andrew High School for Girls and posted strong Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate results in 2022, taking second place in both Information Technology and Electronic Document Preparation and Management.

While in Japan she was placed with Value Solutions Co., Ltd., working on projects linked to the company’s NONFreeze product family.

“My main deliverable was the NONFreeze Verification Tool, a C# WPF desktop application performing real-time network health checks via ICMP ping sweeps and TCP port monitoring to verify device availability across endpoints,” Zafar explained.

She also delivered a companion scanner app and an automation utility meant to cut manual deployment steps and configuration drift. Her portfolio there further included a bilingual English–Japanese inventory platform built with PHP, MySQL, and Bootstrap; firmware tasks in C with FreeRTOS; and translation of technical manuals and web copy from Japanese into English.

Away from the keyboard, she said the placement shaped her personally. The employer arranged halal food and prayer breaks to support her faith, and staff outings took the team to Mount Fuji and Akihabara, including a kimono day.

“The thoughtfulness and respect they showed me as a Jamaican and as a Muslim is something I’ll carry with me for a long time,” she said.

Zafar had been interning with EY Jamaica in technology consulting cybersecurity work and stepped away briefly to take up the Japan offer. With graduation near, she intends to pursue a master’s in cyber security or digital forensics while staying in the technology field.

Her trajectory is already being held up locally as proof that Jamaican students—especially young women eyeing science and engineering paths—can compete for high-profile overseas STEM openings.