Precision Dialogue

Analytics Intern

Spending an entire summer with an analytics-driven marketing consulting firm presented me with an opportunity to broaden my quantitative experience and significantly enhance my ability to think critically and manipulate big data. During my time at Precision Dialogue, I powered through an immersive track that included multiple distinct ways of utilizing data to produce useful solutions for our clients.

In the initial stage of my internship, I developed skills in SQL and built an understanding of relational database architecture. In addition to my daily work which involved analysis on local data tables, I also took numerous coding courses offered online through Stanford and DataCamp. Within the week I had become proficient in basic SQL and moved on to more advanced methods of querying and control with the Marketing Technologies team. Using the code that I wrote, I would combine and sort consumer data into intelligible tables and sets that could be used to enhance the consumer engagement strategy.

The time that I spent working as a member of the Business Intelligence team was far more client-based as we focused primarily on the construction of deliverables to relay the progress of the company-specific objectives. The skills that were strengthened as a part of the BI team were how to efficiently visualize data within Tableau, but perhaps more importantly how to convey abstract metrics and numbers into a comprehensible and meaningful manner for the client. Big data can be intimidating and our clients were looking for answers, not just statistical evidence. I learned methods of extrapolating useful pieces of intelligence from massive data sets and how to creatively and succinctly deliver those pieces to the client. 

The Analytics team was where I truly dug deep into the highly-quantitative investigation that was at the foundation of everything at the firm. A great deal of my time was spent working in two programs: R and Excel. It was through this time that I greatly enhanced my proficiency in Excel, as I was required to learn the catalogue of operations and relational commands. In R, I utilized packages that were written in-house, as well as numerous public packages to write code that instituted the clustering techniques that we wished to employ, as well as some graphical analysis. My capstone project was an analysis of a consumer set from a national department store where I ran the data through multiple programs and created an original deliverable in Excel which was then presented to the client.

The data analysis and visualization techniques and that I acquired at Precision Dialogue are hard skills that are essential in an increasingly data-driven world, yet the more abstract and conceptual approaches to data realization are just as valuable. The professional world is comprised of people who think in differing ways, and it's vital to be able to communicate highly-quantitative findings in ways that are clear and precise to all those involved.