Gap Year? Join Ascendance Foundry.
Ascendance Foundry (AF) is looking for driven, curious students (Grade 11+) ready to take a gap year that actually moves their career forward, not just marks time before university.
What is Ascendance Foundry? Think of it as a tech consulting firm meets a school. We hire the highest-performing students, embed them with client companies or internal projects as Fellows, and run a full training program alongside the real work you're doing.
What you'll do:
As a fully paid fellowship/internship, you'll either be embedded within a client company or within AF’s internal projects.
Client companies:
- As a Forward Deployed Engineer you will build automations and AI tools inside industries like manufacturing, law, energy, non-profits, and private equity.
- Projects include (but not limited to): automated inventory systems, document review processes, accounting and administrative automations, backend software engineering, cloud and database infrastructure, optimization automations, etc.
Internal AF Projects
- AF Fund: This project is a long-term public-markets investment strategy. Fellows develop software systems, models, and research pipelines to invest primarily in high-quality companies that we believe will benefit from major economic, technological, and geopolitical changes over the coming years.
- Accounting: Fellows work to build a custom accounting system to fit AF’s needs.
- Research Project: Working alongside a professor of economics, this Fellow will try to answer the question “As organizations increasingly delegate work to autonomous AI agents, how can human management preserve alignment between high-level organizational intent and increasingly autonomous lower-level execution?” The work involves research, developing management standards, running experiments, and building tools or prototypes to test different ideas.
- AF Events: AF recently ran a combination event pairing an invite-only technology conference with a pro Long Drive Golf event and pro-am. As the event scales, Fellows will develop backend software to support this program.
Who we're looking for:
- High school students looking for a gap-year experience
- Independent thinkers who can defend an opinion and think on their feet
- Evidence of going above and beyond (grades, athletics, olympiads, hackathons, whatever your version of that is)
- Strong communicators, you'll be working directly with non-technical clients
- Technical curiosity, you don't need to be an expert coder, but you should understand how things work and have an eye for good design
What you'll get:
- Fully paid fellowship/internship
- Hybrid workplace
- Work with clients across Canada, the US, UK, India, etc.
- A peer cohort of ambitious students across the country
- Bootcamp and weekly seminars: AI, engineering, and career fundamentals with internal staff. External seminars with senior engineers, politicians, founders, and CEOs (dependent on availability)
- Access to our Expert Network: AI experts, founders, wealth managers, and security experts
- The strongest alumni have the option to return as a paid mentor or contractor after your term ends
Why a gap year at AF instead of just... a gap year? Because you'll graduate with client experience, a portfolio of shipped work, a national peer network, and a head start most of your future classmates won't have, whether or not you go to university after.
