Internship Management Platform

Overview

The Internship Management Platform is a web application that supports the workflows around internships: companies post opportunities, students discover and apply to them, and staff oversee the process. It was built as a team project using Flask and SQLAlchemy, with each user role getting its own views, permissions and dashboard.

The problem

Internship coordination commonly runs on email threads and spreadsheets. Applications get lost, statuses go stale, and nobody has a single view of what’s happening. A role-aware platform gives each participant exactly the workflow they need over one shared, consistent database.

Goals

• One platform serving three distinct roles — student, company and staff
• Reliable application tracking from listing to outcome
• Dashboards that surface the right information for each role
• A clean relational data model that future features can build on

How it works

The platform is a Flask application backed by SQLAlchemy models for users, roles, listings, applications and documents. Routing is organised around roles: students browse listings and track their applications, companies manage their postings and review applicants, and staff oversee the overall process. Authentication and role checks gate each workflow.

Status

The platform is in active development. Core models, role workflows, listings, application tracking and dashboards are implemented; some functionality — such as richer document workflows and notifications — is planned rather than complete, and is labelled accordingly rather than presented as finished.

Decisions and trade-offs

• Server-rendered templates over an SPA: the workflows are form-driven and benefit more from simple, reliable pages than from a heavy frontend stack.
• Role checks at the route level: centralising access control per route kept the permission rules auditable.
• SQLAlchemy models first: designing the schema before building screens kept the three role workflows consistent with each other.

Lessons learned

This project was as much about teamwork as code: agreeing on models before building features, keeping branches short-lived, and reviewing each other’s changes. Technically, it drove home how much of a web platform’s quality is decided by its data model.

Future improvements

• Notifications for application status changes
• Richer document workflows (versioning, approvals)
• Reporting views for staff