Building

Products for crossing borders

Mayesha creates tools that help students move through international education.

Parent company

The Abroad Company

International education and mobility products

Problem: Crossing a border for study involves many disconnected systems: information, people, paperwork, money, and timing. Students often meet those systems through agencies that are hard to verify.
Context: Mayesha and her co-founder built a parent company around that problem after applying abroad themselves.
What Mayesha built: The Abroad Company is the parent for AbroadMates and ApplicationMate. Mayesha leads product direction, research, operations, and new product ideas. Her co-founder role is dated October 2025.
Users: Students navigating study abroad and the teams who support them.
Research or feedback: The products are where Mayesha watches confusion, drop-off, requests for human help, and the effect of feature changes. That observation is product research, not a claim about admissions outcomes.
Current status: Active. Travel, work, and relocation products have been discussed as later work and are not presented here as shipped.
What she learned: Making something work is different from making it understandable. Information architecture and human support matter as much as the model.

Study-abroad mentorship platform

Guidance from people who already walked the path

Problem: When Mayesha applied abroad, she met a system that was confusing and often designed to sell a dream rather than explain a process. Students were left unsure whom to trust.
Context: The whole journey matters, not only an admission letter. Students need to hear from people who have studied, applied, received scholarships, or lived in the place they are aiming for.
What Mayesha built: A mentorship platform where students search for mentors by university, country, scholarship, field, and experience, then book 20- or 40-minute sessions.
Users: Approximately 1,500 users, 210 mentors, and more than 2,000 booked sessions. About 50 users and mentors have been part of closer product research.
Research or feedback: Mayesha studied matching, trust, repeat use, and when students still asked for a person instead of a tool. Feature changes were watched against bookings, completion, and feedback — not against school admissions.
Current status: Live at abroadmates.com.
What she learned: Human guidance still matters when the decision is high-stakes. Automation can organize a process; it does not replace someone who has already lived it.

Application-planning platform

A place to hold a complicated application

Problem: Study-abroad applications scatter requirements, documents, deadlines, and reusable information across tabs, chats, and memory. Students lose the thread.
Context: Mayesha designed the user journey, wireframes, and information architecture after living that scatter herself.
What Mayesha built: An AI-supported application-planning and information-management platform. It matches students to programs and scholarships and centralizes application information. The catalog covers approximately 157,000 programs across approximately 2,700 universities.
Users: Students organizing multi-program applications. A closed cohort of 10 applicants was used for closer study. 856 people took part in chatbot conversations.
Research or feedback: Mayesha watched where people became confused, stopped responding, or asked for a human. Randomized feature experiments and post-use feedback informed changes. Admissions success is not claimed.
Current status: Live at applicationmate.com.
What she learned: Personalization is useful only when the student can still see why a suggestion appeared and can keep control of the file.

Research papers connected to this work live on the academic page.