We offered 15 internships in Semester 1 of this year. Each of our internships is structured and has a clear duty statement outlining the role and the project deliverables and key competencies required. They therefore differ to a student who is, say for example, volunteering. In our selection and matching process, we like to match students not only based on their preferences, but also to what interests them and what will be mutually beneficial for both parties: the host organisation and the student.
We received 20 applications for the 15 available internships- as this was a small number, we matched these students manually based on their preferences, resumes and answers on their application forms. Students are currently asked to provide their top 3 internship preferences. Semester 2 this year, we now have over 80 internships available and 160 student applications. This was very time consuming as again, the matching process was done manually. Even before the matching takes place, there is quite a lot of manual admin work that could be automated in this process e.g. spreadsheet with all the student details, preferences, etc.
We can guess for Semester 1, 2017 - there will be a further increase in both internships on offer and student applications. This will become unmanageable for us if we have to follow the same, current process and match these students manually. As with manual processes, these are more so open to mistakes or errors versus computer-generated processes.
We are hoping this is where your students can help, by coming up with some sort of software that can automatically match students based on preferences or rankings? We can tailor the internship application form as your students see fit in order to get the most effective and fair matching process and results. This may be that we ask students to choose more than their top 3 preferences, or potentially adding other questions to include keywords and tags.