After Failing Morocco’s Medical School Entrance Exam Twice, She Won Two Awards in France
After failing Morocco’s medical school entrance exam twice, Oumaima Boumlik turned to engineering. In France, she found a program far removed from the data science she wanted to study. She then taught herself in the evenings and on weekends.
In 2020, Oumaima Boumlik took technical tests and attended interviews in pursuit of her first internship in France. The Covid-19 pandemic froze hiring; some internships she had been considering were canceled, while other applications went unanswered. She also says she encountered reluctance related to her headscarf, though she could not always know the reason.
The start-up Verteego eventually offered her an internship in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. Yet the good news went unread for a week: the email had been lost among hundreds of rejections. Oumaima recounts the episode in a personal account published on Medium in July 2025.
On Bladi.net : She was a student near El Jadida; today, she is the only electronics engineer at her company in France
This difficult search had begun long before she entered the job market. After earning her baccalaureate in Morocco, Oumaima tried twice to get into medical school. After failing both times, she went to preparatory classes and then to the École nationale supérieure des mines de Rabat. In 2019, she moved to France for a dual degree at IMT Lille Douai, now called IMT Nord Europe.
She set her sights on data science and artificial intelligence. But the courses she took, she says, did not match the specialization highlighted during recruitment. She failed a programming module in Pharo, but meanwhile built her own training program: online courses, certifications, practical projects and a computing portfolio. After her internship at Verteego, she says she eventually received permission to join the specialization she had been seeking.
Two awards for an industry internship
For her final-year internship, Oumaima worked at the SEB Group on forecasting demand for spare parts. On June 15, 2022, she left the Mines-Télécom Foundation awards ceremony with two trophies: second prize from the jury in the best final-year internships category, and the public’s Coup de cœur award. She announced that she had received more than 2,000 votes out of around 4,000.
This recognition came before she joined a 24-month international program at SEB. In an interview with HelloWork in 2023, she describes her successive assignments in France, Germany and then Spain. In Barcelona, she worked in particular on forecasting sales for two product lines.
In another piece published in February 2025, she says she moved into data governance and began mentoring students and recent graduates. Among other things, she shares advice drawn from her own mistakes and challenges.
