Name: Anna Goncharova
Class Year: 2023
Major: Computer Science & Psychology
Hometown: Saratov, Russia
Internship Organization: Duolingo
Job Title: Software Engineer Intern
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
What’s happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
My internship this summer is at Duolingo, a language learning app company based in Pittsburgh. For the last two months, I have been working on the stories team, which is responsible for maintaining and adding new stories - a type of learning content in the Duolingo app presented as a short story. My project focuses on accommodating more exercise variations within the stories and adding a variety of text styles to be used by story creators. While my original goal was to do that for just our iOS app users, I am now making these new features available in the Web app as well. In order to do that, I have also worked with the backend component of the app, the part that connects what the learners see and the data that is coming from the database, as well as with an internal web tool for our story creators. Interacting with so many different components of the app means I get to cooperate and get feedback from several software engineers that specialize in different areas, but also designers, quality assessment specialists and learning scientists.
Why did you apply for this internship?
My goal for this summer was to gain some practical experience in software engineering, but being an international student whose first language was not English, I have always been passionate about language learning, making it affordable for people, and helping them stick with it. Duolingo immediately stood out to me as a company whose goals clearly aligned with my interests outside of computer science and that also had a strong engineering function, which was important for providing the mentorship and hands-on training I was looking for.
Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you?
A good portion of the skillset I have been developing over the summer has to do with the technologies I am using for my project. To give you some context, I have never worked with iOS prior to this internship and our backend is written in a programming language I have not used before. But in my opinion, the bigger overarching skill that I have been able to grow into due to that experience is learning on the job. One of the perks of software engineering is that you indeed never cease learning. Even experienced engineers have to keep up with new technologies or sometimes learn them from scratch if they switch teams. Being comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing everything immediately and learning by doing are incredibly valuable competencies that I have been developing over the summer. Another important skill for software engineers is collaboration. Applying the feedback from my code reviews, asking for clarification, gaining a feeling of when I should get input from a more experienced engineer on a problem all come from experience, and I have been lucky to receive plenty of mentorship that helped me become comfortable with those nuances of the job.
What is most rewarding about your internship?
Personally I really enjoy seeing the results of my work with my eyes. Being able to play around with the new features that I added myself as well as have my whole team test them and give me feedback is the type of immediate impact that is rare to find in other lines of work as an undergrad student. To add to that, knowing that the changes I am making will eventually contribute to improving the learning experience and outcomes of millions of Duolingo users is a huge motivating factor. Finally but not at all lastly, the community at Duolingo is made up of some of the kindest and most talented individuals I have come across. From the care with which our offices are looked after, the amazing events that are organized for interns weekly that allowed us to get to know Pittsburgh, to the support we receive as we work on our tasks, the people at the company have really made my summer experience fulfilling.
Visit the Summer Internship Stories page to read more about student internship experiences.