A Student Asked Me One Question That Led Me to Build ProofAura
A conversation with a student changed how I think about internships.
He was in his final year of CS and needed an internship to graduate.
I assumed his biggest concern would be getting the certificate.
It wasn't.
His first question was:
"Will I actually get to build something real?"
That stuck with me.
Because when I looked around, I noticed a strange reality:
Students need internships to satisfy college requirements.
Companies want experienced candidates.
Yet many internships involve fake projects, repetitive tasks, or certificates with little real work behind them.
Everyone checks the box.
Very few people gain meaningful experience.
So I started building ProofAura.
The idea is simple:
Instead of assigning "internship projects" created purely for training, students work on real projects that need to be built. Their contributions are tracked, verified, and reflected in a certificate backed by actual work completed.
I'm still validating the idea, and I'd love honest feedback from this community.
If you're a student:
What was the most frustrating part of finding an internship?
If you're a founder:
Would you ever let interns contribute to real projects? Why or why not?
Trying to understand whether this problem is as widespread as it seems.
I'd be careful treating this as a student problem too quickly.
The interesting question may not be whether students want real experience.
It may be which side of the market actually needs the problem solved badly enough to change their behavior.
Those sound similar, but they can lead to very different conclusions about validation, adoption, and what deserves confidence early on.
I wouldn't make that call casually from the current signals.
That's a fair observation.
The student conversation was what sparked the idea, but I'm not assuming the problem applies equally across all students.
My current focus is quite narrow: final-year students who need a mandatory internship for their college requirements and are looking for something more meaningful than a certificate-only experience.
What I've been hearing from some of them is that they want both outcomes: something they can submit to their college and something that helps them become job-ready.
Longer term, I'm also exploring the college side of the equation, where institutions could run internship cohorts through the platform rather than having students source opportunities individually.
Still validating both sides, but for now I'm starting with that specific student segment and working outward from there.
Appreciate the push to think carefully about which side of the market feels the pain most strongly.
What makes this tricky is that both sides can appear validated for a while.
That's usually where founders become confident in a direction before they've isolated which side is actually pulling the market forward.
If you're curious, drop your email and I'll send over the tighter version.