Before we start, you should know that every program does their intern selection process differently. Evaluators care about different things. Some may use class rank as a cut point- they don’t evaluate anyone not in the top 25%, for example. (You can’t do anything about this so stop worrying about it). Some may have a committee, or a single individual, or an advisory committee to a handful of decision-makers. So, this is not universal. But I wanted to give you a peek into how I (and institutions where I have worked in the past) chose interns.
First, we would take all of the applicants and divide them according to school where they graduated. Our committee was usually made up of 8 faculty members. Faculty would then pair up, so we had 4 pairs. Each pair then indicated which schools they would evaluate applicants from. Usually this was based on people they knew at those schools.
Each pair then got all of the applicants from the schools they agreed to review. The applicant pool was evenly divided among the pairs. Each pair then read all of the applications in their pool. When I read applications, I made a spreadsheet with the applicant as a row, and then columns including letter of intent quality, references, leadership, teaching experience, research experience, class rank, CV, notes, and overall score.
I usually used a 4-point score: 4 for not-rankable, and 1-3 divided according to my estimation of them being in the top, middle, or bottom third of applicants. Each applicant sent to the pair would be reviewed by both members of the pair. Then my partner and I would meet and discuss the applicants and agree to a score for each of our applicants. Then each pair would send their ranking to the chair of the committee, who would organize them. We would all meet together as a committee and discuss the rankings, moving various applicants up or down according to information we had gleaned (e.g. by calling friends at institutions).
It was a huge effort and took a lot of time. And, as it turns out, it’s probably meaningless. In a study where we compared rank with intern performance, there was no relationship. This is similar to interviews- they don’t really relate to the performance of a person in a position. So we could probably accomplish this all with just randomly drawing the names out of a hat. But, like interviews, we FEEL like doing this process should improve our outcome, so we do it anyways.