Meloy Program summer internships offer start-up experience

A new internship program has been making a difference for students across the Texas A&M University College of Engineering. Offered by the Meloy Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program (MEIEP), the Meloy Internship program gives unique opportunities to ambitious students who want to gain hands-on experience working at startups and growing companies. Each internship is a paid position and offers connections with industry leaders who are solving real-world challenges. The program’s first cohort began in the summer of 2025.

Sami Melhem, a senior computer science major, first got involved with the Meloy Program through their Entrepreneurship Hour class and weekly coffee chats. Melhem was one of the first students to learn about the dynamic new opportunity.

“Professor Chris Curran told us they were starting this internship program, and I applied right there in class,” said Melhem. “I filled out the applications, completed two interviews, and got in.”

Melhem completed his summer internship at Momentum Technologies Inc., a startup that creates processing technology for recovering high-purity, reusable critical minerals and metals. 

“I wanted to work for them because the field was something I didn’t know,” Melhem said. “The internship was a great chance to learn on my feet and look more competitive.”

Another participant was Archit Sonawane, a junior interdisciplinary engineering major who works as a student worker in the Meloy Program. Although he was the last person to interview for the position, Sonawane received an internship from Arion Blue, an engineering procurement management company (EPCM) in the oil industry. 

“I was really excited to intern with Arion since it’s an Aggie 100 company, and their CEO, Michelle McNichol, is a former student and Aggie engineer” Sonawane said.

Real world experience

As a research and development intern, Melhem worked on a wide range of projects. His early work included learning the industry and contributing to two of his supervisor’s research papers. As the internship progressed, he repurposed existing but unused server infrastructure to host internal software tools. This proved profitable, as he then developed a major software tool used to predict the output of the company’s mineral extraction process.

“I used the framework from my boss and the data from the engineers to code the prediction tool,” Melhem said. “With this tool, we could model out an entire processing plant from the cost and total output to construction time, and it was later used by my boss in presentations for potential clients.”

As an entrepreneurship intern, Sonawane experienced eight different departments across the company, including business development, finance, engineering and human resources. In these diverse roles, he learned about tenders and bids, cost-benefit analysis, pay milestones and more.

“No matter how good your business solution is, what is the cost?” said Sonawane. “Is it competitive? What is the driving factor for the company? These were the sorts of questions I was taught to ask.”

Lessons learned

While the internships taught Melhem and Sonawane many skills, a few stood out. Melhem cited unit economics and internal tools as key takeaways from his internship.

“I have taken the principle of unit economics or cost-benefit analysis and applied it to other areas of my life,” Melhem said. “I also learned a lot about building internal tools, which is a software niche that I will likely work with in my future career.”

For Sonawane, the examples of servant leadership and community exhibited within the company altered his view of how one works in a job.

“I learned that a task is never a one-person task. It’s very interdependent,” Sonawane said. “You can’t do it alone, so you have to rely on people to work together.”

Having completed his experience, Melhem highly recommends that entrepreneurially minded students complete a Meloy Internship. Thanks to its startup focus, the internship offered him much more than a traditional experience.

“When you intern at a startup instead of a bigger company, you get to learn so much more, get your feet wet, and experience a much wider scope,” Melhem said. “You’re in the trenches actually working on everything.”

Sonawane echoed similar sentiments.

“There are a lot of internship options, even within a single company, so there’s something for any engineer,” said Sonawane. “Plus, Meloy Internships are paid, and the company invests time, training and knowledge into you that you can use in the future.”