From Launchpad to Seer: Meet the Interns Behind Our AI Optimization Academy

Earlier this spring, we launched our AI Optimization Academy in partnership with Launchpad, bringing three Philadelphia interns into Seer to do real GEO research and testing alongside our team

(More on the program and why we built it here.).

Now that they're settled in, we wanted to let them speak for themselves. Below are three stories from Yara Kemeh, Jamir Ong, and Bryan Gunawan in their own words.

[We will be updating every Friday with their stories, one-by-one, starting on May, 8th, so stay tuned for more!]

Meet Bryan Gunawan...

It's been over a month since I joined Seer as an intern, and a lot of words come to mind when I think about it. But one word sits above the rest: welcoming. The space, the work, the respect, the community, the way people here actually value each other, all of it has felt genuinely good.

But let me back up a little and tell you about how I got here.

I came to the United States in 2023 from Indonesia. It was not an easy decision for my family. COVID had hit hard internationally, bringing with it a wave of setbacks that reshaped a lot of lives, including ours. My mother had her reasons, and she shared at least one of them with me.

So we came.

I was 17, in a country I didn't know, with no friends, no network, and nothing familiar outside of family. Some people might feel lost in that situation and I won't pretend I didn't. But I also couldn't let go of the thing I kept seeing underneath all of it: a new start.

I should be honest that I wasn't a great student back home. I wasn't particularly driven, and I loved gaming far more than I loved being productive. School was really just something I got through rather than something I invested in, but things shifted when I arrived.

Maybe it was the distance from everything I knew or the weight of the opportunity. Whatever it was, I decided to take it seriously.

I enrolled at Horace Furness High School in South Philadelphia and graduated with straight A's. I joined clubs, took AP classes, and I even became a teaching assistant to my CS teacher. One afternoon, while I was building a new scheduling system for another CS teacher, mine pulled me aside and told me about Launchpad.

I was ecstatic.

No traditional college pathway. A direct route into tech. Real work, real learning, and an income while doing it. It sounded too good to be true, and honestly, I was fine with that. I brought everything I had into that program and committed to proving what I could do.

The experience has been transformative. I won't pretend there weren't moments of doubt, thoughts about whether a degree would eventually be required, whether any of this would be enough, but those doubts have gotten quieter.

What's gotten louder is a track record I'm genuinely proud of: four client projects completed, each with positive feedback. That might not sound like much on paper, but for someone who entered this industry with no connections, no degree, and no roadmap, it means a great deal.

And now, I'm at Seer Interactive.

I am doing research on AI behavior, validating hypotheses, working to understand what's right and what isn't, and contributing to that knowledge so others can build on it. Sixteen-year-old me in Indonesia would have never believed this was possible.

I used to think I'd end up doing something purely physical, something that required none of the curiosity or ambition I was still figuring out how to use. And yet here I am.

When most people picture a corporate workplace, they imagine grey walls, stiff formality, and a culture that tolerates you at best.

Seer is not that.

It feels more like a community than a company. It is still professional and structured, but there is a warmth here that I didn't know to look for. You feel it in conversations and in the way people show up for each other.

Before this internship, my first question about any job was about compensation and that was it. That was the whole filter.

Now, the first thing I'll ask a future employer is: What does your community look like?

That shift tells me everything about what this experience has meant.

Stayed tuned for May 15 & 27, to meet our other members: Yara & Jamir...