Developed by a group of Texas A&M students in April 2019, ThoughtSpace became a company that aims to help connect college students with businesses.
The ThoughtSpace testing application is currently under beta testing that students can participate in and the app will launch properly in September 2019.
On February 2019, prior to becoming a company, the team behind ThoughtSpace went to Silicon Valley to meet with Facebook, Roku, Silicon Valley Bank, Google and billionaire investors. So far, the platform has helped around 200 students with internships and is actively working with five companies. Updates for the fall will have student profiles start matching with companies automatically, rather than having to go through a manual process.
According to Mohamed Bialy, ThoughtSpace CEO, the app started out very limited, being mainly chat-based three years ago. But as the number of people involved grew, so did the project. Bialy said that what started as a small group, eventually became a company that served a wide variety of students.
“We started out as a student organization, just a bunch of people who came around once a week to talk about technology,” Bialy said. “After that, we became the first ever student run program. [We] got funded by the School of Innovation, they gave us a big budget to run a program and then we outgrew that infrastructure, so that we became a company.”
Yousef Sammour, chief development officer for ThoughtSpace said the application benefits students and companies alike. Sammour said because ThoughtSpace was developed by students, it takes into consideration the needs of college students the way other services wouldn’t.
“We created this pretty much by students for students. We really care about the students and want to get them real-world [opportunities] and gain valuable experience,” Sammour said. “When it comes down to an employer, it’s where you would rather assess somebody based off of their performance and projects they have completed over their college career, [over] just off a resume and an interview. The project based makes more sense and is more reliable and credible.”
Mohamed said ThoughtSpace intends to offer students long-term opportunities and increasing the number of internships students participate in while in college.
“What we try to do is get the companies to work with the students year round, instead of just using them for summer internships,” Bialy said. “It becomes, essentially, a big power incubator where students and companies can work on projects, work on courses, work on challenges so they can grow their skills and be more ready for when they leave college.”
Yuqi Hu, business development intern at Clariant used ThoughtSpace to help her find an internship.
“The service was good,” Hu said. “ThoughtSpace sent a mass email. I applied through the link with my resume. Then the hiring managers of the internship company selected me for [an] interview. The staff at ThoughtSpace were friendly. I will definitely recommend it to my friends to find internships.”