We were looking for a fun way to promote our internship program to University of Florida and Santa Fe College students, and decided a ood old fashion competition was the way to go. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't inspired by the intern competition scene in the social network, but rest assured all we had was mountain dew and nachos.

So students were able to compete in either Web design or Web programming. For the design, competitors were given three sites to choose from, along with the site's main goal and target audience. The best of the best were selected to present their design at the live finals. After much deliberation by our expert panel of judges, aka our badass designers, Dallas Barnes was named the winner of the design contest.

That's him in the middle with his big check for $250. Here is a look at the site he designed:

And while the designers were presenting, the programming finalists were busy in the corner pounding away on some code. The students that performed the best on the preliminary test were asked to great a web form with some required fields, validation, and contingencies that would post to a database and send an email. The winner, who completed all the tasks with ease, was Phillip Peterson, shown here with his booty:

All in all, it was a great first competition. All of the competitors were great, and we're hoping to make this a part of our internship program promotion each semester.