Internyl wins Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 14th District

When asked what inspired the creation of Internyl, the students said, “It was nearing the end of the school year. As usual, we all sat together at lunch. But this time was different; there was a lingering sense of shame and regret in the air. Everyone felt off and absentminded, as if something was eating away at them. After a deafening silence, someone broke the tension: ‘Yeah, I don’t have anything set up for this summer. I couldn’t find any programs, and the ones I did weren’t what I wanted.’

“It was such a simple confession, yet so burdensome because of the tremendous pressure to stand out and prepare for college applications. The problem wasn’t rooted in the lack of internships but rather in where to search for them. Most websites lack the compact functionality that students desire. They are usually filled with gigantic blocks of text, making the search process incredibly tedious. In addition, jobs now require previous work experience, compelling students to scour the internet desperately, only to end up with hours of wasted time and nothing achieved. This deepens the disparity not only in students’ career readiness but also in education across high schools in America. Furthermore, with a combination of APs, extracurriculars, and familial responsibilities, not all students have the time to search for internships. Often, many struggle to find internships because they don’t know what they’re looking for or where to actually look.

“After we all discovered our mutual problem, we agreed that it was time to finally resolve this issue. We used our summer to design, develop, and deploy an application that would scour the internet with the help of AI to find internships and display all the necessary information one would need to decide if the internship is suitable for them.

“We were inspired by Mr. Blumm, who tirelessly worked every day to make sure students could see available opportunities. Each week, he made a collection of opportunities he found and sent it out to students across our school. Searching through this PDF for opportunities is much more efficient than searching through the entire internet, but it’s still entirely curated by one man during his free time. With the development of AI, we knew we could streamline this process, making the entire discovery portion much faster. And with our web development skills, we could make a user-friendly interface for anyone to find the perfect opportunity based on filters for subjects and costs.”