InterSpark

Dashboard
Talent Search
Opportunities
Landing Page

Inspiration

InterSpark came from a problem my co-founders and I experienced ourselves. As high school students, we were building projects and looking for teammates, mentors, and internships, but there was no good place to find them. LinkedIn felt too formal and inactive for students our age, and platforms like Discord and Reddit were too messy to find serious people. We realized that high schoolers should not have to wait until college to start building strong networks and real experience.

What it does

InterSpark is a professional networking and discovery platform built just for high school students. Students create profiles that show their skills, interests, and projects, not just grades. They can explore an opportunities feed with internships, competitions, programs, and local jobs, and filter by what they care about. InterSpark also has an AI assistant that lets students type what they are looking for, like a co-founder or an internship, and instantly get relevant people and opportunities.

How we built it

We designed and built InterSpark as a team of three students. We focused on making the platform easy to use and actually useful for high schoolers. We worked on the profile system, opportunity discovery, and AI-powered recommendations. While building, we shared our progress online and used feedback from other students to improve the product.

InterSpark is a Python-based web application built with Flask and deployed on Vercel. It uses Supabase as its backend-as-a-service, providing PostgreSQL database management, authentication, and file storage capabilities. The frontend is powered by Jinja2 templates and JavaScript for dynamic interactions, while the backend integrates Google's Gemini AI API for intelligent features like skills extraction and search analysis. Security is handled through JWT-based authentication, and data validation is enforced using Pydantic models.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was deciding what features to build first. We had a lot of ideas, but limited time. Another challenge was building trust as high school founders and convincing students to take the platform seriously. Balancing school, extracurriculars, and development also made things harder.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we turned a personal problem into a real product. After sharing InterSpark on Instagram, hundreds of students engaged with our posts and showed interest in the idea. Our content reached thousands of views in just a few weeks, which helped confirm that this was a real problem worth solving.

What we learned

We learned how to work as a team and turn an idea into something real. We gained experience in product design, development, and user feedback. We also learned the importance of validating ideas early and staying focused on solving the core problem.

What's next for InterSpark

Our next goal is to launch InterSpark publicly and reach hundreds of active student users. Long term, we want to grow InterSpark into the main networking platform for high school innovators. We are also looking for mentorship and guidance to help us scale and improve, and programs like UnFounders can play a huge role in helping us do that.