The Career Development Internship Search

Abstract

My Senior Individualized Project, SIP, involved the construction of the Career Development Internship Search for the Career Development Center (CDC) at Kalamazoo College. This software was developed to help students acquire information about internship possibilities by using a web browser to select specific search criteria (state, category, quarter offered, and name of the company) matching their internship needs. It can be accessed on-line at anytime of the day at http:/ /max.cs.kzoo.edu/chuck, thus allowing students to search for information when it is convenient for them. The idea for this project first started to develop in the spring of 1995 when I acquired an internship position with Kalamazoo College. I was hired to develop a web site for the Kalamazoo College Admissions Department. During that internship I learned how to use the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML}; the language to program the user interface on the Web. HTML is necessary to code the interface for the Career Development Internship Search. However, I was lacking in the skills to perform the actual search. During the fall of 1995, I was hired by Nucleus Communications, Kalamazoo, Michigan as an intern. Nucleus Communications is primarily a Web development company. It was there that I learned how the Web browser communicates with the Common Gateway Interference, CGI. However, this alone would not be enough to perform the search, I still needed to know how to program in a CGI scripting language called Perl. Matt Volmar, first introduced the Perl language to me. He suggested the book PerlS in 21 days. This became the sole reference manual necessary for me to learn the language and program the Career Development Internship Search.