My Sophomore Experience
"NOT UNTIL WE ARE LOST DO WE BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND OURSELVES."
-Henry David Thoreau
As a freshman, I was trying to find myself and my passions. I figured out what I enjoyed, and what I might want to pursue when I grow up. This year, after starting to understand myself, I started to pursue my aspirations and make my mark in the business world. The connections I made as a freshman alongside the advice I took from leaders in my dream jobs brought me a plethora of opportunities that I capitalized on this year. In some ways, I can see my dreams starting to materialize, and that's what this year brought to me. This was a year of hard work and long days, and also one of learning and experiencing some of the most incredible things I have ever seen. I grew my business and sports network and met some amazing people. I secured two amazing internships: one as a Data Analytics Intern for the Cincinnati Reds, and my current internship with Nielsen Catalina Solutions. I'm extremely involved on campus, from being an executive board member of my fraternity to being a Business Law Teaching Assistant. I have found a passion for business analytics and coding. I'm learning more and more, and I'm striving to continue to become the best version of myself.
Last year, I became enamored with the use of analytics in sports. I could only learn so much about sports analytics online, though, so I spent my fall semester trying to find an analytics internship. I researched analytics online, reached out to a number of business leaders on LinkedIn, gave countless resumes to recruiters on and off campus. I saw sports analytics as a long-term goal that takes time to enter, so I focused more on getting a business-focused internship, yet the connections I made in sports as a freshman truly paid off for me. From November until May, I interned as a Data Analyst for the Cincinnati Reds, which was the most amazing first internship that I could ever ask for. I had the opportunity to create ticketing analytics dashboards, build out dad-heavy marketing reports, and make dynamic and predictive sales dashboards that were shared with Reds executives. It was so cool to see how the Reds, my favorite sports team, utilize analytics to make their business model great. I got to work with people from so many different departments, learn my first database language, and see how numbers are changing the way that businesses run. One highlight of this internship was when I created a dynamic Single Game Ticketing Dashboard that interactively displayed ticket prices and sales numbers per opponent, month of the year, and city/state of purchase. It was really cool to finish this dashboard and think back on everything I had learned up to that point during my internship. Another amazing experience was working there on Opening Day. Getting to sit at the game after work (suit, tie, and all) showed me the power of passion in sports, and the excitement about working in such a field. The cherry on top was getting to meet the General Manager of the Reds near the end of my rotation. He was a baseball analytics intern in college as well, and getting to pick his brain for a few minutes about how he got to where he is today really excited me about what my future can hold if I continue to work hard.
The toughest part about this internship was balancing my time between working, school, and my plethora of extracurriculars. It was really exciting to start to take classes in analytics and coding because I got to gain some of the hard data skills that I became really excited about last year. That being said, learning some of these concepts became pretty difficult. Specifically, I took a class in C++ coding (often described as one of the toughest coding languages to learn), which was the most difficult class I have ever taken. This was the first coding language I had ever learned, and so it was even more difficult. I can't even count the number of days in which I would come from a long day of class and work to spend 6+ hours struggling with code for a lab or project. I ended that class with the most rewarding B- in my life, but at the end of the semester I realized that I learned so much from this struggle, and since then I have been able to pick up multiple other coding languages with much more ease. I learned so much this year, gained an even bigger sense of purpose, and fulfilled many of my planned-upon goals.
Currently, I am co-oping at Nielsen Catalina Solutions, an advertising analytics company that is part of the Nielsen Company as well as the Catalina Company. This is by-far the most technical internship I have been a part of, and I have learned so much about how statistical analyses are creating new trends in business. Analytics in the advertising field is very new, and so it has been very eye-opening to get to work in such a proactive environment. I am hoping to continue with NCS throughout the next school year; I truly enjoy this field of business and I love being assigned my own projects studying and analyzing Fortune 500 companies' advertising campaigns. I am excited to see what more i learn in this internship, and I hope I can leverage it to obtain a co-op next summer working at a company like Delta, P&G, or US Bank doing analytics. Like Thoreau said, we are lost until we understand ourselves, and since I now understand myself a little better, I cannot wait to find out what my future holds for me in the next few years.
