Marketing Analytics Internship at Meijer

Purpose: The Biostatistics MS is a Professional Science Master’s (PSM) program. This interdisciplinary program is designed provide students with advanced technical skills as well as help them develop the soft skills that employers are looking for. A central requirement of the PSM is the internship experience. Challenge: The Meijer internship program is project-based. At the beginning of the program, interns are given a task or idea for which they are responsible to develop. The original focus of this internship was to build a process to predict customer attributes, such as digital shopping attitudes or promotion communication preferences. This was accomplished by leveraging survey data to build predictive models using readily-available demographic data and transactional history. Experience: I was able to become familiar with several enterprise-level data mining tools. Interfacing with database management systems in order to query and wrangle data was a fundamental aspect of the experience. Statistical modeling and machine learning techniques were explored and applied to real-world data. I also learned about store operations, supply chain, marketing, pricing, and many other aspects of the business. Outcome: The primary objective of building a process to predict customer attributes was successfully completed. The process was fine-tuned to deal with various data types and situations, automated where possible, and optimized for efficiency. Impact: I was able to use the process to predict several customer attributes, adding to the business’s bottom line by generating tangible insights