USponsor Me was founded in California, USA, in 2017 by Sarah Papasodaro and Maxime Hilaire, two French individuals who had gone through the J-1 process themselves.
I’ve fully embraced life and culture in the United States—and I couldn’t be happier. This experience has been incredibly rewarding, and I’m passionate about helping others have the same opportunity to live, learn, and grow through the J-1 program.
Sarah Papasodaro
What We Do
USponsor Me specializes in preparing and managing the required documentation for J-1 intern and trainee visa applications, ensuring accuracy, compliance, and peace of mind. We provide personalized, end-to-end guidance to both the participant and the host company throughout the process.
Through our trusted designated sponsor partner, we issue the DS-7002 and DS-2019 forms required for visa issuance and ensure full compliance with program regulations. Participants also benefit from support before departure and throughout their stay in the United States, including insurance coverage and ongoing assistance.
What We Believe
We believe that by experiencing the world and embracing different cultures, people gain a deeper understanding, foster mutual respect, and help build a more peaceful and connected world.
Our Mission
Our mission is to provide students and professionals with the opportunity to explore life in the U.S. and fully immerse themselves in American culture, thereby strengthening their language and communication skills, personal development, decision-making, and social interaction.
Meet The Team
Sarah Papasodaro
CEO & Co-Founder
Sarah Papasodaro was burned out with her job in France and decided to head abroad in early 2014. She received a position in NYC and gained new respect for the expat process.
Leveraging her 5 years of experience as a software consultant, she is highly skilled at understanding customers’ needs and managing the development of a tech platform that will efficiently solve their problems.
What started as a blog about her experiences quickly gained a flurry of new readers, reaching 500,000 visitors in just two years and securing an impressive 65,000 subscribers to her newsletter in three years. It eventually evolved into USponsor Me and a new full-time career. Sarah is a talented business developer with 3 years of experience in startup creation and management.
Read Max & Sarah’s story here: how they landed in the USA until they got the Green Card!
Tom Lous
Big Data & Machine Learning Engineer
Tom Lous is a Big Data & Machine Learning Software Engineer.
He develops Scala and Python software that runs on a Spark cluster or as Dockerized microservices on a Kubernetes cluster.
He is proficient in using various tools to set up a robust data ingestion and processing pipeline in the cloud and to deploy the results via a scalable API.
He is also skilled in cleaning and analyzing vast amounts of data, followed by training, validating, and testing machine learning models and deploying them in production.
Maxime Hilaire
Technical Advisor
Maxime Hilaire holds a Master’s in computer science and has 9 years of experience as a full-stack software engineer. He has now worked on more than 10 successful projects in production for clients such as Airbus, Sharp, and Fox.
Maxime’s challenges as a tech lead are to design and build cloud apps that manage tens of millions of documents at scale, allowing applications to ingest terabytes of data smoothly at the “speed of light.”
Maxime’s two AWS certifications (Developer and Architect) and in-depth knowledge of NoSQL, big data, Cloud Computing, and JavaScript have enabled him to build our platform to its current level.
He is also a true cost-efficiency expert. He designed USponsorMe architecture to be more than 10 times cheaper than most existing companies with the same technical challenges, while not sacrificing stability in the least, and designing a very fast and efficient UI.
Our Trusted Designed J-1 Sponsor Partner
A unique experience in the USA is priceless…
Because it will lead you to amazing professional opportunities that you do not know yet 😉
— USponsorMe Team
Read and watch our Success Stories!