Description

AutoIntern is a project that was created by myself and 3 fellow interns during my second internship at AT&T. Early in our internship we were made aware that the General Internship Program was hosting an Intern Automation Challenge. For this challenge, we were tasked with coming up with a solution to a problem the internship program management was having. Every summer, they had the responsibility of assigning every incoming intern a position that fits their major, their skillset, and their location preferences. Over 80 hours were spent every year just trying to find jobs for every incoming intern.

My team's solution was to create a Python script which takes all of the incoming interns and all of the available positions and solve this assignment problem. We held several meetings to plan out how we wanted to tackle this and how to avoid as many possible problems to give every intern the best possible job for them. Once we had our plan set, I took to creating the script. As I was the only member of the team with any existing Python experience, I became the lead developer on this project.

Our program ended up using a points system to determine the compatibility of each intern with each position. We assigned different weights to the interns' major, skillset, and location preferences depending on their answers to questions made to judge which they more heavily valued. Bonus points were assigned to interns who had skills outside of what the job required, as we felt more experience in different areas is something that should be rewarded. Once every pairing was scored, we used what is known as "The Hungarian Algorithm" to determine the best possible fit for each intern with a 1-to-1 assignment.

I'm happy to say that out of 12 teams, my team ended up winning the Intern Automation Challenge and our solution was used to make assignments for every incoming intern, including myself, the next summer.