The inspiration for this project came from the Internship Fair conducted by Entrepreneurship Development Cell (EDC), TIET. As a technical team of EDC, we developed a platform where startups can register and provide internships to college students at any time of the year.
Learning new skills at a company or an organisation through an internship program is quite a hands-on way. Moreover, COVID-19 has changed the toll of numerous students and employees currently. Tsunamis of job losses have been witnessed throughout this year and keeping track of such upcoming opportunities has become toilsome for students. Being a part of this modern Digital Book titled century, every assignment and project is handled online.
To overcome this problem and in support of the modern methods, Akash Jindal and his team including Kajal Goel & Krishna Mundra created an online portal for the students of Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala studying in 3rd and 4th Year to apply for Internship or appear for Placements.
What was the source of inspiration behind this project?
The inspiration for this project came from the Internship Fair conducted by Entrepreneurship Development Cell (EDC), TIET. As a technical team of EDC, we developed a platform where startups can register and provide internships to college students at any time of the year.
When placement season arrived, we realised a lack of a proper management system for the internship application process on campus. Most of the work was being done manually with the help of Google forms. A lot of redundant information was being processed each time a company visited the campus. That’s when we got in touch with our teachers and presented our solution to automate the process. Under their guidance, we upgraded our portal to add more features and tested it to ensure the smooth flow of the whole internship selection process.
Can you elaborate about the tools and technologies that were used while creating this portal?
By using modern software development technologies like Django/Python and JavaScript, we created an online platform for the management of campus internships process at Thapar University. It solved the problem of redundancy as we created a centralised store for which we used the PostgreSQL database for storing the data of all the students and the process of applying was just reduced to a single click.
Students can also view all the internships they have applied for, track their progress and check the schedule for upcoming rounds. We also established an SMTP server for sending mass notifications informing all the students via email when a new internship is posted on the portal itself. Interview experiences are also available for students to tackle the D-Day Pressure.
We also added a report generation system for the Placement Coordinators which generates the infographics of the all the students getting interned/placed in different companies and for this we used some JavaScript libraries like ChartJS and FusionCharts.
Tell us in detail about the features, total number of users and downloads.
‘TIET Internship Portal’ is a management system to provide hassle-free management of the internship process from application to selection. Here students can find the companies that visited the campus, all at one place. Students need to fill their details just once when they register. Thereafter, they just have to select the internship they wish to apply and attach their resume and bio-data for the application and it’s done.
Furthermore, one can track the progress of the application and check the schedule for the different rounds of companies one has applied for. It also has an interview experience section, where alumni can share their interview experience to help calm the nervousness of the applicants before the interviews. Not just the students, it also resolves the trouble of the admin/college by providing them with easy-to-comprehend statistics about the selected interns. About 1500+ pre-final and final year students from TIET are using this platform presently.
How does this internship portal work?
The students are importuned to register with their college mail ID, fill in their profile details, resume and work interests which will enable them to choose a company appropriately. Students can also view all the internships they have applied for, track their progress and check the schedule for upcoming rounds. There is also a notification system which informs all the students via email when a new internship is posted on the portal itself. Moreover, it has the capability of closing the forms of companies automatically as per the deadline given and the final dataset is further sent to the company.
Every person desires to have a driven job and aim for a high-end career. Thousands apply, but only a few nail it. This portal further provides students with interview experiences given by the Alumni and Final Year students of our college to tackle the pressure.
The system has been hosted on the server of TIET, Patiala and has been in under action for the last three months and is being used by 1500+ students. As per the stats collected from students, it is termed to be an efficient and robust platform to keep track of the upcoming and outgoing companies and aims at providing guidance to crack interviews through best way possible.
How can this project help the students in the long run?
The target audience for this project is college students. From internship application to the selection, the process is quite rigorous. But keeping track of all the internships one has applied for, their schedule for different rounds and at the same time, searching and applying for another internship can consume a significant part of one’s energy.
It is not uncommon that in the middle of this mess, one overlooks an internship opening in one theirs dream companies. That’s why we have come up with the ‘Internship Portal’ to make this process as easy and simple as possible so that the students can focus more on the preparation for the internship tests and interviews.
Where is the project available?
‘TIET Internship Portal’ is a web-application and is available on the Internet. You can access it using any browser at https://internships.thapar.edu.
Are you still trying to optimise this project? If so, explain how?
The optimisation is a never-ending process. We are regularly monitoring the user experience on the portal and will roll-out upgraded versions of the same as and when we find some significant optimisations. Apart from that, we are also looking to extend it for full-time job placements in the near future.
What are the advantages of this project?
Working on this project had certain benefits. Apart from the help, it provides to the students and the college which we mentioned earlier, it also provided us with hands-on experience on a live project. We realised some real-world problems with launching a project which could not be realised otherwise.
Are you currently working on any new project? If yes, then please elaborate.
We have not started any other project as of now. Presently, we are looking forward to work on this project and upgrade it for full-time job placements.
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