Intern-Connect – A simple and minimalistic portal for applying and posting internships

Abstract

An internship is a professional learning experience that offers meaningful, practical work related to a student’s field of study or career interest. An internship gives a student the opportunity for career exploration and development, and to learn new skills. It offers the employer the opportunity to bring new ideas and energy into the workplace, develop talent and potentially build a pipeline for future full-time employees. Internships not only provide first-hand exposure to working in the real world but also allow students to harness the skill, knowledge, and theoretical practice they learnt in university. One can acquire endless amounts of education in your life; however, that knowledge doesn\'t always translate to working life. The great thing about internships is that it teaches young professionals about the specific industries and companies they are interested in. For engineering students, an internship is all the more important as the expectations or skill sets needed for securing a job in the industry does not match the curriculum.

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

Gaining industry experience has significant benefits whether you are in high school, college or entering into the workforce. Regardless of your current education level or desired career path, an internship can encourage your professional growth. An internship is important because it can present you with new skills and opportunities that you would not receive otherwise. Interns not only gain technical knowledge within the industry of their choice, but they also learn how to interact with professionals in a workplace setting, and develop essential soft skills like time management, organization, adaptability, problem-solving and teamwork. The main roadblock faced today by both employers and aspiring students lack a common platform to search and acquire internships. This project aims at alleviating the problem by creating a web application that can be used by both aspiring students to search for internships and employers to provide opportunities to these students by providing internships on the portal. The core component of this project has been the MySQL database which is supplemented by a concise and easy to use User Interface.

II. PROBLEM STATEMENT

Internship Portal that helps students in search for their internship based on their skill set and area of interest. It stores the details of the user, company(which gives internship), internship details, registration details. Students choose the internship as per his/her requirements. Also checks whether the incentive or other perks are available for or not. The company gives internship details regarding the work profile and duration. One company can give multiple internships. One customer can have only one offline internship and for online he/she can have one internship per company and fill in registration details.

III. PROPOSED SOLUTION

Intern-connect is a portal to make connections between students and employers. Its a portal that helps students to find internships according to their skill set and area of interest. Student can choose internship as per requirements. Also incentives information is also available in listings. Intern - connect also gives the option to employers to list multiple internships. But one student can have only one offline internship per company and fill in the registration form.

A. Technology stack for project

1. MySQL Database: MySQL is used to store data regarding students and employers to have proper information about internship whereas student can insert his skill set while registering ie fields like name, experience, skills, qualifications etc. Will get filled and registered according to which student details are shared employers to get proper information about applicant. When it comes on employers side all details regarding internship get posted like stipend, duration, company name etc. Required by student to understand what are company's requirements in internship posted.
2. Bootstrap Web Interface: Bootstrap is a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. It contains CSS- for student and employers portal to which it is easy to understand whereas it has login and signup options for employers and student to access their respective fields of interest .We have also used status symbols as buttons on company side portal on which company can assign status like accepted, hold, rejected etc. Bootstrap made things seamless for front end developer to which developer can work on functionality than afterwards on user interface. Whereas Bootstrap made us easy to design our web page according to our requirements.
3. PHP Web Backend: With the support of PHP , SQL can be managed with the help of php my admin web page built-in php. PHP is used to connect our database with SQL. On phpmyadmin all database actions can be performed like database import, manage, edit etc. Its interface acts as mediator to access database queries and perform actions. All database related actions are written with the help of PHP language. With the help of PHP have inserted validation to which data cannot be mishandled or fidget with so that we can receive data as required from user.The output of PHP code being parsed and processed on a web server - which can be any type of data, such as the HTML or binary image data created will be the entirety or a portion of an HTTP response.

B. System Design

ER and EER diagrams form the base while designing the database schema. They provide clarity, insights and a functional plan for the application to be developed.

1. ER Diagram: A diagrammatic representation of the ER model is an Entity Relationship Diagram (ER Diagram). It is essentially a database design or blueprint that may be implemented as a database later. The relationship between entity sets is depicted using an ER diagram. An entity in a database is a table or an attribute of a table. The ER diagram depicts the entire logical structure of a database by displaying relationships between tables and their characteristics.
2. EER Diagram: Enhanced entity-relationship (EER) diagrams are a more detailed variant of entity-relationship (ER) diagrams. Databases can be constructed more fully by going deeper into the attributes and limitations. An EER diagram provides you with all the elements of an ER diagram while adding:

a. Attribute or relationship inheritances.

b. Category or union types.

c. Specialization and generalization.

d. Subclasses and superclasses.

The EER diagram below showcases the database design for the Internship Portal Web Application. There are six main tables:

• Employer.
• Student/User.
• Application.
• Company.
• Unit.
• Internship.

Onsite and online internships are two types of internships. The EER Diagram depicts the relationships between each table in a straightforward and succinct manner.

C. Relational Schema

The primary component of a relational database is the relational schema. Relation schema describes the relationship's design and structure, which includes the relation name and a set of attributes/field names/column names. Each attribute would be associated with a domain. It is straightforward and possesses all of the qualities and capabilities required to process data while maximizing storage efficiency.

Relational Schema diagrams aid in the division and design of a database into a relational or table-like format. It can also be used to apply integrity restrictions and display relationships between different tables in a database.

IV. IMPLEMENTATION

The project uses the XAMPP, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP stack. Implementation screenshots for the Database and User Interface have been attached below.

A. Website

This is the registration form for company interface where all the companies can make the listing of their companies for internships.

Above is the registration form for students where they can fill in the details. And make themselves eligible for the internship.

B. DATABASE

The above images show the structure and actual implementation of every table in the database along with the integrity constraints. All the tables have not been included in the EER and relational schema showing their use only for the web implementation and serve as extensions to the main tables depicted in the EER and Relational Schema diagrams.

VIII. FUTURE SCOPE

The project Internship Portal has a vast scope in future. A feature on filter by location could be added and the students can apply for the internships in their nearby location. Another most important scope could be that institutes can acquire this project and could provide internships to students which are available in colleges and could manage the interns list of the college instead of students applying from another internship portal.

Conclusion

This project focuses on creating a platform for all those students who all are facing difficulties while searching for internships. Also, while building this platform we focused on designing a minimalistic & easy user interface so that it will be helpful for all the students to fill in their details & apply for the internship as per their choices. With the help of this platform the companies can also find student interns for their companies as their working employees, by just listing their internships and its details on our website. So basically we will be working as a connecting platform between the companies & students. By using this website Intern-Connect all of us can build a bridge of communication between our interested internship companies.

References

[1] https://projectsgeek.com/2017/12/internship-portal-management-system-project.html [2] https://careers.umbc.edu/employers/internships/what-is-an-internship/ [3] https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3592&context=etd-project [4] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHyeNIk44nuQrhwyL02d-wnyLXy-OC-40

Copyright

Copyright © 2022 Vedant Mishra, Vedant Jha, Shivsagar Mishra, Om Bhonsle, Mr. Kashif Shaikh. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.