Summer 2020 Volunteer Internship

With COVID-19 cancelling many internships, we wanted to find a way for self-motivated students to still obtain experience while also helping their communities. This LinkedIn post and associated form (below) attracted over 100 interested people. From this, we have about 80 active people in Slack and 6 teams.

With this in mind, we wrote the following in GitHub to document the common problems facing non-profit organizations.

Students will self-organize around problem statements and will need to be self-motivated and collaborative to accomplish their projects. By doing this, we are confident that we can write letters of reference that will explain each person's contribution.

Thank you to PayPal!

PayPal has provided $4,000 as a prize to say "thank you" to those who worked through their summer to benefit non-profits.

As stated at PayPal's Social Innovation page:

Our Social Innovation efforts build upon our strong sense of commitment and purpose by harnessing and deploying our unique capabilities, resources and expertise to drive positive, lasting social impact through our business. We focus on three key areas: helping to advance the financial health of people and small businesses; increasing the volume and scale of charitable giving around the world; and, strengthening the communities in which we live and work.

For the 22 people who responded with their PayPal accounts, we split this prize up, and have sent this money over as of September 23rd, 2020. This is a great way to conclude the months of effort put in by this awesome people. We are so happy that we are able to provide a surprise to everyone involved. 🙏

End of Summer Volunteer Internship Demo

Thank you to the smart, brave, determined, and amazing 22 of you who sacrificed your summer to help non-profits! Here's a sample (to the right) of the certificate of achievement that they will be receiving.


Three teams were able to make time to demo their projects to us on August 10th, see their videos below and be sure to check out the demo videos for each of the teams as you can see how they approach their respective non-profit problems throughout the summer.


Sample certificate for the 2020 summer volunteer internship
Sample certificate

Analyzing STEM/STEAM Trends

Team 1

Risk Scoring for Animal Adoption

Team 6

Health Record Management

Team 4

OpportunityHack.io

Team 5

Teams and participants

Teams officially form by documenting their team as a GitHub issue ticket here. What you see below is a detailed list of each team, what they are working on, and the project status.

May 18th: Introduction - Angel

June 5th: First Demonstration - Clayton

June 19th: Second Demonstration - Clayton

June 22nd: Demo - Angel

July 4th: Heroku and simple website demo - Clayton

July 18th: Live data fetching now active - Clayton

July 21st: Partner term frequency of a PDF using R - Angel

July 31st: Google Trends and Heroku integration, Caching - Clayton

July 31st: Bar plots for partner terms and words to remove - Angel

August 7th: STEAM Pop Tutorial - Clayton

August 7th: Data analysis with Jupyter Notebook for Twitch - Vaikhari

August 7th: Search and navigation functionality - Vaikhari

August 10th: End of internship demo

Team 2 BuRN

Problem 8. Notification system

Started: May 11th | Cancelled on June 16th

Team 3 Inventory Team 1

Problem 7. Inventory management system

Started: May 22nd | Slack: #2020-vol-intern-inventory-team-1

June 5th: Demo 1.2 - Juan

June 5th: Demo 1.3 - Juan

June 26th: Demo 2.1 - Juan

June 26th: Front-end demo - Evan

July 3rd: Scheduling chatbot - Kito

July 4th: Updated chatbot based on schedule availability - Kito

July 9th: Scheduling API and corresponding SMS message confirmation - Gayathri

August 10th: End of Internship Demo

August 28th: Scheduling bot demo - Kito

June 23rd: First demo - Brian

July 14th: Lots of added functionality - Brian

July 31st: Research functionality added - Sandya

July 31st: UX Design, Donations - Amudhan

August 1: Full walkthrough including Netlify CMS - Brian

Team 6 Hoist the colors

Problem Statement 4. Risk Scoring

Started: June 11th | Slack: #risk-scoring

Team 8 PAK Risk Score

Started: July 16th | Slack: #pak_risk_score

July 26th: Front-end - Animesh

July 26th: ML model- Karishma

August 10th: End of internship demo

Team 7 Digitize Team 1

Problem Statement 1. Digitize Paper Forms

Started: June 18th | Slack: #2020-digitize-team1

July 31st: Upload demo - Marco