Join our Virtual Program

We proudly present the Nurturing Excellence and eXperience in Technology program in collaboration with The Cigna Group to support your professional development this summer! This program is based on real-world challenges and insights from The Cigna Group employees, ensuring practical, industry-relevant learning and engagement.

This program prioritizes students who have not yet had a technical internship experience. We design this virtual program to support your personal and professional development to be competitive and confident in future opportunities.

What you will gain

• Connect with industry professionals & alumni
• Personalized mentoring & guidance 
• Build a project you can showcase 
• Earn a certificate upon completion

Example Topics Covered

• Professional Skills
• Agile process, DevOps
• Product, Ideation, Prototyping
• Frontend development
• Backend development
• Cloud computing
• Secure Programming
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Empowering Futures

The Vergnano Institute for Impact is committed to building connection and passion in engineering and STEM fields.

Our programs are for everyone.

In particular, we welcome and encourage students who are…
– first in their family to go to college, or
– attending a Title I school or district, or
– have participated in English language learning classes, or
– looking forward to meeting their first engineer,
…to apply!

Interested?

Thank you for your interest in the NEXT Program! A collaboration between the Vergnano Institute for Impact (VII) and The Cigna Group.

The NEXT Program is completely FREE! 

NEXT Program Application Timeline

• March 16th – Begin Application Process
• March 31st to April 14th – Begin Rolling Interviews
  • Begin interviewing students on a rolling cadence
• April 6th – Close Applications at 11:59PM
  • Last day for students to apply
• April 14th – Last Day of Interviews
• April 17th – Make Offers to Participate in Program
• April 23rd – Offer Deadline
  • Deadline for students to accept opportunity
• May 26th to Aug 11th – 2026 Virtual Program

Weekly Program Time Commitments

(1.5 hr) Group training: Tuesdays 9 – 10:30 AM ET

(1 hr) Small group collaboration

(3 hr) Individual learning

(4.5 hr) Project work

Total = ~10 hrs / week

Are you a rising sophomore? 

Please also consider applying for VII’s Sophomore Summer program!

Sophomore Summer is an in person program at the Storrs Campus for 4 weeks. Computing students in Sophomore Summer who are also NEXT Developer-in Training will work on the NEXT program tasks on Tuesdays and Thursdays while in person in the program.

When Sophomore Summer ends after 4 weeks, they will continue NEXT virtually after having built some in person connections.

You are welcome to apply for BOTH programs!