Two Bloomington High School South juniors won the 2025 Congressional App Challenge for Indiana’s 9th Congressional District for creating an app called iFind that helps students find local internship opportunities.
The Congressional App Challenge is a national initiative encouraging middle and high school students to use computer science to address needs in their communities. Districts all around the country participate every year.
Students Jiping Liu and Jiin Hur worked on the app over a few months last year, calling about 100 local businesses to see what internships they had for students that they could post on the app. They wanted a variety of in-person, hybrid and fully remote options to offer students, as well as create a space where students and local internship providers could connect directly and help advance their careers.
“Both of us were looking around for internships, and we realized it was kind of hard to find those opportunities if you didn't know someone who knew someone who, like, ran an opportunity or something like that,” Liu said.
What distinguishes the app from similar job-hunting sites, such as LinkedIn or Handshake, Liu said, is that it’s a hyper-local focused app, rather than a national or global network. There are also no advertisements or ways to make money off the app. Liu and Hur also put guardrails in place.
“Whoever runs the app for each community, has to manually verify each individual internship listing to make sure that it's an actual, authentic opportunity, rather than some scam or something potentially unsafe,” Liu said.
Liu and Hur’s current app model has about 10 internships listed but is not formally active. The app’s code is now open source, meaning that communities around the world, including school corporations, can adapt it to local needs.
Bloomington High School South Science teacher Kirstin Milks served as a mentor for Liu and Hur while they created the app.
“Workplace learning is an increasingly important requirement for graduation pathways in the state of Indiana,” Milks said. “So, there's a real opportunity for our community to use tools like this to be able to increase access, but also to help young people see that there are opportunities in our community for when they graduate and are looking ahead to their adult careers.”
A few weeks ago, Liu and Hur traveled to Washington D.C. to showcase their app and meet other winners.
“We met a lot of very talented and smart young people across the country that are working to advance their own app making skills, but also connect with more coders,” Hur said.
The app will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol Building for one year, featured on House.gov and showcased on the Congressional App Challenge website.
