Internship Description
Jing Qian, ‘19SEAS, and Ethan T. Schmidt, ’19BUS interned at the Earned Asset Resource Network, Inc which works at the intersection of financial technology and economic inclusion to empower low-income Americans to take charge of their financial lives. As part of their partnership with the Columbia Business School Fintech Initiative, EARN was trying to help consumers build financial resilience as well as devise nudges to increase personal saving rates through the use of data analytics. Jing worked with the researchers to generate new insights through various forms of data analytics techniques, including Machine Learning and Statistical/Data Analysis. Ethan worked on developing data models that analyzed and predicted consumer spending and saving habits and behavioral triggers based on traditional financial histories. These students were supported with new SESF funding earmarked for financial inclusion.
My project was to explore the merit of combining experimental research tools in unsupervised learning as well as psychometrics to devise customized triggers that are matches to financial services retail customers’ fundamental psychological motivations, as measured by their personalities. The goal of these triggers is to nudge customers to better personal financial management outcomes, be it to save money (increase savings’ account balances), pay down debt (lower default), or receive more rewards for their favorable financial behaviors.
Throughout my internship with EARN I was able to directly apply my knowledge of R, along with SQL and Python, to my work with their database. I was able to use the concepts that I learned in Business Analytics I & II in developing processes to analyze various data structures. While my knowledge and expose to non-profits was fairly limited during my tenure at CBS, I was still able to cross-apply the fundamentals of customer behavior and market incentives to better understand EARN’s users and members.
Being 100% remote to a company in San Francisco was not always easy, and so constant email, slack, and phone contact was required to fully integrate myself to the rest of the EARN team. Nevertheless, EARN is a relatively small organization and is laser-focused on their goal of helping low-income American save money, so getting up to speed with their work was easier than at a large, multi-national corporation. the greatest challenge of the summer was managing the project scope and complexity creep as it began to run over the assigned weeks of my internship.
My key takeaway from the summer is a better understanding of real-world data structures and developing hands-on experience with them. As I begin my full-time position after this internship, I am thankful for the opportunity to query real-time data and analyze functional models of customer behavior. I also think that as a 100% remote employee for the summer, I have a greater appreciation for the team dynamics that come with geographically-separated teams. Having never met anyone in person and presenting all of my work over the phone or video teleconferences, I have honed my storytelling abilities to clearly convey ideas from the page alone.
