My Summer Internship with MyDD.ai

What I Actually Did This Summer at MyDD.ai

The past three years at Villanova University I’ve worked tirelessly towards my mechanical engineering degree. Despite the massive investment I’ve put in along the way, I finally had to admit to myself that I wasn’t passionate about it. That was an extremely hard reality to face going into senior year, in fact it still isn’t. It felt like everyone around me was locked into their path, while I was stressed about what to do with my summer, and no clear way into a different field.

My data science professor, Jake, mentioned a few times in class that he ran his own startup, an AI company called MyDD.ai. As any curious young female would, I did some digging on my own, liked what I found, and eventually worked up the nerve to reach out to him about it. I went into our conversation with zero expectations, at the very least I knew it was good networking practice.

Even after Jake and Dan let me on their team, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Over the past three months I’ve done a variety of tasks: wrote and filmed social content across several social media platforms, built out a new business intelligence dashboard using SQL, Supabase, and the Stripe API, worked directly in GitHub, learning our repos and getting my local dev environment set up, and researched certifications and app store optimization strategy.

What I am most proud of

So far, I’ve spent the most time building a BI dashboard to track subscriptions and revenue, pulling data from Supabase and the Stripe API and putting it together in R Markdown. Before this summer I had no idea what those platforms were. I came in not knowing how to write a SQL query and now I know how to integrate two different data sources. I learned how to pull live data from an API when the database couldn’t be trusted, matching records that were formatted differently across systems, and figuring out which “customers” in the data were real paying users versus internal test accounts that needed to be filtered out entirely.

What I liked about this project wasn’t just the tools I used, it was realizing that data never lies. Even if things seem confusing, the data is telling you something, you just haven’t figured out what yet. After many iterations and testing I realized half of debugging is just believing that there’s a real, findable reason things look weird, and not giving up before you find it.

By the end, I had a dashboard that actually separated real revenue from noise, which was so rewarding because without it, nobody at the company is clear on their real numbers.

The other half of the job

The flip side of my summer was way less technical and surprisingly just as hard. When I pitched myself to intern this summer I didn’t expect to play any role in the marketing side. I wrote and filmed scripts for social videos, built out multi-slide carousels, and drafted personalized outreach messages trying to get child-safety and parenting-focused creators to respond (they mostly did not, and I am still trying to determine what a good cold DM actually looks like). I also picked up compliance and business literacy that I didn’t expect to. I’ve been researching certifications like kidSAFE and Educational App Store recognition, and helping put together the insurance applications a company like ours needs to operate. Although these tasks are really random, it was cool to see the more niche steps a company has to take on the path to becoming more legitimate.

It’s all completely different than the dashboard work, and I didn’t expect to enjoy switching between the two as much as I did. But looking back, I mostly enjoy the promise of seeing something new and challenging everyday.

What’s next for me

I’m excited for my future at MyDD.ai. Now I’m moving into working directly on the web app itself by actually shipping changes that improve how it functions and how it feels to use, instead of just reporting on the numbers behind it. With the web app, I’m the one deciding what happens next, and if I get something wrong, a real kid or parent is going to run into it.

I’m also helping expand our Learn feature by building out a game component for it. After putting a lot of thought into MyDD Learn, I landed on the main point that kids don’t stick with something because it’s good for them, they stick with it because it’s fun. So instead of just giving them lessons, we’re figuring out how to wrap those lessons in something that feels more like play: progress, small rewards, a reason to be eager to learn.

During last week’s one on one with Jake, I asked if he would be wiling to let me stay on through next semester. Coming from a place of complete unknowns in the spring, I didn’t expect to end the summer deeply invested and excited about the future of MyDD.ai.