By FAR the Best Internship!

Elgin, Market Research Intern, San Francisco, California

I’ve been interning here since May 24th and I’m very sad to leave. I’ve had such a fruitful and rewarding experience here and I don’t want it to end. But as they say all good things must come to an end. Though I have a more qualitative background I found myself truly becoming passionate about market research and data! As a market research intern I learned about various applications like Hitwise, Userzoom, comscore, and literally became best friends with Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel.  The application I used the most was Hitwise.  Hitwise is a global online competitive intelligence service which collects data directly from ISP networks to aid website managers in analyzing trends in visitor behavior and to measure website market share. So I used Hitwise to gather a multitude of data to show marketers how our users are getting to our sites and to show who are competitors are! Though I was just compiling data and putting it into PowerPoint presentations at first I wasn’t able to fully comprehend what the data was saying, but after extensive experience I am now able to convey a story through data.

I also had the honor to assist in usability testing for TV.com and Chow.com as those two websites are undergoing some changes. And that experience was extremely fun. We hire a recruiting firm to recruit users of the website or active Internet users to come into our usability lab on the 1st floor. The lab is set up where the user sits in the front room with an administrator (either Matthew or Jenna—my bosses) and the rest of the team sits in the back room behind a smoke glass mirror.  The computer in the front room has an eye tracker and heat mapping software. The eye tracker lets us know in the back where the user is looking throughout the website and the heat mapping tool lets us know where the user is spending most of their time looking on the page.

The research team was also very nice and I enjoyed getting to know them better over the duration of my internship! In all honesty this is my 4th internship and this is by FAR the best one that I’ve had. I loved to be around such intelligent but down to earth people. I loved the fact that I didn’t have to wear a suit and tie. I loved the fact that my boss actually was invested in my learning experience here and wanted to make sure that my internship went smoothly. I simply loved coming in the office everyday to this positive atmosphere. Though I’m leaving, I will make sure to keep in contact with the many people that I met here it was definitely an experience I will never forget!