Whooo’s Reading, San Diego, CA
For the past several months, I worked as a quantitative marketing intern at an edtech company called Whooo’s Reading, founded by Williams alums in 2010. Whooo’s Reading creates online educational materials for reading comprehension and writing to supplement school curriculum. Their mission is to “re-associate reading with joy,” providing creative resources that teach students to wield communication skills and develop independent thought in an engaging way.
I first familiarized myself with the Whooo’s Reading website and researched the edtech industry to get a sense of the technology, language, and goals shared by the company and their competitors. My initial project was an analysis of school and district job titles to examine which job titles the company has been most successful at making deals. Using an export from their customer relationship management (CRM), I combed through the data in R, searching for relationships between job title and win likelihood, deal size, and other measures of success. After identifying some initial trends, I investigated their significance with some statistical tests (including chi-square tests and ANOVA tests). I packaged these results into a presentation to the Whooo’s Reading team as a consolidated report.
The goal of my initial investigation into job titles was to identify a few roles for Whooo’s Reading to target more specifically with their marketing materials. Based on their relatively high frequency but low success rates with media specialists and reading specialists, my next step was to research these two roles and create marketing personas for them. I supplemented background research (reading university pages, job postings, and academic journal articles) with field interviews of three individuals in each role. Armed with a document full of notes and transcripts, I sought to answer the questions: What are the goals and frustrations of people in these roles? What questions do they seek answers to that Whooo’s Reading can help answer? I used some basic SEO strategies and features of Google AdWords to whittle down a long list of topics into a few keywords about which Whooo’s Reading will then create blog posts, landing pages, and/or eBook materials.
As a result of this internship, I discovered my love for investigating patterns in data and searching for spontaneous, creative solutions when confronted with an error. I look forward to pursuing more math and statistics-related courses at Williams to further my knowledge in that respect. I appreciated the intersection of quantitative analysis and creativity in marketing, and I found the position a valuable real-world test of my abilities. Working in the education field was also eye-opening for me, and I enjoyed knowing that I was contributing social good through my efforts.
I am grateful to the ’68 Center for Career Exploration for giving me the advice that led me to this opportunity. I also appreciate the generosity of Mr. McCalpin for helping me make the most of this experience.
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