Student Spotlight: Transforming a Class Project into a Startup

Sarah Jenkins, a senior at State University, didn't expect her capstone project to go anywhere. "It was just a tool to help roommates split grocery bills," she says. "Ugly UI, spaghetti code, but it worked."

She uploaded it to Intern Connect as part of her coursework submission. Two weeks later, she received a message—not from a recruiter, but from a local accelerator director who saw the potential in her user flow.

From Grade to Seed Round

"They liked that I solved a real problem," Sarah recalls. "They didn't care that the code wasn't perfect. They cared that I had shipped something useful."

Today, "FairShare" is a funded startup with 5,000 active users. Sarah is no longer looking for an internship; she's looking for her first hires. And she's looking on Intern Connect.