Discovering the Power of Data at Ringer Sciences: My Summer Internship Journey
As a Business Honors, Management Information Systems, and Marketing student at the McCombs School of Business, I have always been fascinated by the intersection of technology, strategy, and data. When the opportunity to intern at Ringer Sciences arose, I saw it as a chance to sharpen my skills, obtaining a firsthand look at how an innovative tech agency operates. I was eager to dive into the data-driven aspects of business that Ringer Sciences shows expertise and leadership in.
Learning and Growing Through Project Work
One of my favorite projects involved enhancing executive visibility for a c-suite client in the pharmaceutical industry. I collected, categorized, and analyzed social media posts, determining which topics within these posts generated the most excitement among audiences to find content trends and develop strategic insights. By doing this, the end user - the executives - would be able to more thoroughly understand their LinkedIn performance and impact, and would be armed with an understanding of how to adjust and optimize their content to reach target audiences more effectively. This experience allowed me to see how social intelligence can empower companies to improve their social media strategy through data-driven messaging.
In another project, I helped conduct a competitive analysis for a grocery retailer, digging into the digital conversation around its competitors and examining customer sentiment. This process involved pinpointing the sentiment toward each brand and understanding the popularity of different conversation topics among consumers. In addition, I used industry tools to examine various social platforms, identifying differences in topic and nuance across social media sites. Through the experience, I learned that every social media interaction is a data point that aggregates into a larger picture, a fact which requires retailers to take action to remain ahead of competitors in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Working on these projects showed me that data has huge potential to redefine how businesses function and succeed. With my time at Ringer coming to an end this summer, I would like to share some thoughts on how I can apply what I had learned outside of this internship.
Inspiration Beyond the Internship
At The University of Texas at Austin, I serve as the Operations Director for Social Entrepreneurship Learning Lab’s fellowships (SELL), an 8-week interdisciplinary fellowship for undergraduate students who want to create meaningful social ventures. Ventures have ranged from services providing free birthday parties to foster children to setting up little libraries in communities of need.
In this role, I manage the budget, direct fundraising efforts, and oversee marketing. Inspired by my work with Ringer Sciences, specifically my work on executive visibility, I decided to create a spreadsheet that tracks the engagement of SELL social media posts. I first tagged each of our posts based on categories, such as fundraising, spotlights, and announcements, and then calculated engagement metrics based on impressions, likes, comments, and reposts. I confirmed that posts with more visuals received the highest levels of engagement, while fundraising posts received the lowest. With this insight, I plan to rethink our approach to promoting fundraisers next semester, which is vital for our end-of-semester social impact pitch competition. Ringer's focus on actionable intelligence has inspired me to enhance some of SELL’s processes using analytics.
Another way Ringer Sciences spurred me to think differently about my experiences at UT involved my interactions with the data science team. As an advisor for the Canfield Business Honor Program’s Honors Business Association, I chose to improve how we match for our big/little program. Ringer's innovative approaches inspired me to take a step further by using Python to match bigs and littles based on survey responses. This approach not only improves the efficiency of matching, reducing the burden of manually reading each application, but also creates better data-driven matches. As a result, I reengineered the survey forms. These reengineered survey forms are friendlier to data analysis, more efficient to fill out, and more conducive to better overall outcomes.
While these are just two examples of how I was inspired, I am just scratching the surface of ways that I can apply Ringer Sciences methods to my own life to make my academic and forthcoming professional experiences smoother and more successful.
Final Takeaway
My internship at Ringer Sciences has been a transformative experience, providing me with practical skills in data analysis, social intelligence, and innovative thinking. Working on diverse projects and witnessing the direct impact of data-driven insights has been incredibly rewarding and educational. I am thankful to Ringer for these opportunities and excited to continue applying what I’ve learned to my academic and professional pursuits. I aim to drive innovation and make data actionable in all my future endeavors.
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