Winterns Reflect On Their Time at Dow Jones

It becomes increasingly apparent how quickly time flies when you intern at a company for three weeks. Through our program, Women in Technology and Entrepreneurship in New York (WiTNY), we were able to take advantage of this opportunity at Dow Jones during winter break. It was important for us to learn as much as possible, and we believe we made the most of our experience. Our time as ‘Winterns’ was primarily focused on a project that would be the foundation for a Factiva churn risk dashboard. However, our learning experiences went far beyond our main project.

We began our research by examining a data set of companies that cancelled their Factiva subscription within the past year and a half. We conducted most of our research by interviewing salespeople for an in-depth, qualitative analysis. The goal of our 10-day project was to analyze these cancellations to further understand why clients churn, and identify ways to spot a client at risk of churning. We learned through our research that qualitative data provides more insight and ultimately helps to link the usage data together into a comprehensive story. Conducting interviews was an exciting opportunity, and we hadn’t had the chance to do such a thing prior to this internship. We gained the confidence to ask questions and lead discussions, which taught us that conversational interviews are the most effective.

During our time at Dow Jones, we also had the opportunity to develop our soft skills. This path of personal growth became apparent to us during a professionalism workshop on our first day. In fact, we believe that we improved the most during our project exploration. We overcame challenges, such as working collaboratively with a new team. We had to quickly learn each other’s strengths in order to work on our task. In the end, communication was the best way for us to overcome this.

The employees at Dow Jones provided great insight, not only during our interviews, but also during weekly panel discussions. They shared their experiences on working after college, work-life balance and learning from your failures. These lessons prepared us for the rest of our careers, far beyond our mere three weeks.

Written by Emily Chavez, Hannah Santiago, Riann Mars, Sabrina Reyes and Tahamina Chowdhury