Client
The client, United Negro College Fund Special Programs Corporation (SP) – works diligently to create connections between the diverse, high-performing workforce of the minority education community and private industry to address the nation’s imperatives. The goal of UNCFSP is to provide Minority Institutions (MIs) with capacity-building opportunities; the government and private industry with access to a talented and diverse workforce; and individuals with the experience, exposure, mentoring, and development they need to have successful and empowered careers.
Requirements:
- To develop an online application, recommendation, and review system for undergraduate internships and fellowships
- To set up the program online for which the students can apply, recommenders can recommend, and reviewers can complete the review process to choose program awardees
Solution:
Since SP facilitates and manages the process of federally funded internships, scholarships, and fellowships for minority students, they wanted MMG to develop an online application system for the students and a decision aiding system for reviewers to sort through the large amount of student applications.
MMG came up with the idea of developing an online application form that was set up by the SP staff for each project (each award was considered as a project for internal purposes). The form was divided in several parts, i.e. personal information, educational information, employment information, career and personal highlights, recommender information and any additional information that SP staff would need to include. The application process was very simple for the students as well. They needed to login and register for the award, complete the online form, and submit it once they completed the application.
An online recommendation system was set up by MMG to complete the entire recommendation process online. SP staff was provided with the ability to create an online recommendation form for each project. Once the student entered the email address of the recommender, an email would be sent automatically by the system to the recommender requesting him/her to complete the recommendation with the guidelines to register and recommend the student online. Upon completion of the recommendation, both the student and the recommender were notified.
MMG also set up the online review system for the reviewers to go through the student applications and give their feedback on each application. Again SP staff was given the ability to create an online review form questionnaire for each reviewer, and the ability to invite the reviewers to complete the online review process. Once the review process was completed, a report was generated based on the reviewers’ feedback thus aiding SP staff to select a student for the award.
Major Achievements:
- A paperless application, recommendation, and review system was built making SP go green
- The online approach sped up the entire application process saving the SP staff a lot of time and effort
- The system was built as an engine facilitating SP to lease the system to other organizations and hence increasing the organization’s additional profit
