After a rewarding summer internship in 2025, mathematics major Arianna Maxwell will return to Roblox as a full-time employee in June.

By Jason P. Dinh

Arianna Maxwell was ecstatic when a recruiter from the online gaming and technology company Roblox called her late one evening last winter, offering her a summer internship in software development. 

“I was so elated,” she said. “After talking to the recruiter, I called my dad and was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I got it.’”

Maxwell, a senior majoring in mathematics at the University of Maryland, always loved video games. She was raised in Santa Cruz, California, and relishes childhood memories of playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo Wii with her dad. She also played Roblox growing up.

“During my internship, I reminisced when I looked at current popular experiences because sometimes they were the same ones from when I was young,” she said. 

Maxwell always wanted to work in the gaming industry. Games were her gateway to computer programming—she created Minecraft mods starting in middle school. But she didn’t major in computer science. Instead, she pursued her other passion: mathematics. 

Maxwell first fell in love with math during high school. She was drawn to the definitive nature of proofs—how they could be arbiters of right and wrong. But she said it was the “cool and creative” nature of math that captivated her. After she realized that the field had broad applications and offered more than just memorizing formulas and rote work, “it was pretty hard to drop the interest,” she explained. 

She explored math inside and outside the classroom at UMD. For example, through an undergraduate fellowship with UMD’s MathQuantum Research Training Group, she researched algorithms for partial differential equations on quantum computers. In her free time, she read computer science textbooks to teach herself how to code. 

“It sounds embarrassing to say that I read textbooks for fun,” she said, laughing. But her hard work in self-teaching paid off once she started her internship at Roblox. 

Over the summer, she worked on a feature called instance streaming, which loads objects into and out of the video game. Now, Maxwell will return to Roblox as a full-time software development engineer after she graduates in the spring. She’s looking forward to working on a broader range of engineering problems—and applying her math skills to her new work.  

One obvious application is image rendering work, she said, which she has pursued through independent projects in her free time. 

“So much of computer graphics is trying to use computer science and algorithms to render images and do a good job approximating life. A lot of that is just math, and then optimization to make it practical,” she explained. “There’s a lot of discrete math involved in computer science. The higher you go, I’ve noticed that the two fields blend more and more.”

Beyond subject matter expertise, her math studies fortified her discipline and strengthened her resolve by requiring her to focus on solving a single problem for four to five hours at a time. Plus, she developed a strong quantitative intuition and abstract reasoning skills. 

“Math training really helps in being able to hold and manipulate many moving pieces in your mind,” she said. “The practice develops the abstract reasoning required to think through any complex system.” 

Those skills are useful in any field of employment, she said—and, looking ahead toward a long career, she believes they’ll take her a long way.