Olivia Ou

My name Olivia Ou. I am in my final year of the Bachelor of Mathematics degree. I always enjoy studying maths, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it after graduation. In the first two years of uni, I realized that learning programming is highly beneficial. Over this summer, I worked with Wildfire Sport & Trek as the industry partner. They are an online and physical retail business for outdoor and sporting gear.

This project was self-guided and it was fortunate that I have taken the Numerical Methods in Computational Science course, which gave me experience in Matlab. Wildfire Sport & Trek seeks to provide the best service to online customers, so a big part of what they do is to improve their ecommerce platform.

For the project I was able to apply my statistics and programming skills to accomplish three tasks: creation of an advertising spending analysis program, a shoe sizing model, and a pricing strategy report.

For  the advertising spending task, we analyzed performance of a dataset (in Excel). After identifying patterns, trends and inefficiency in spending, I developed a program which analyses Adwords data and produces a professional report. Also, to increase customer retention, we identified an optimal pricing strategy. We also created and critiqued (improve) a mathematical model to estimate error ranges in manual measurement of shoe sizing.

This project was very satisfying to work on. Not only was it an amazing opportunity to apply my knowledge and technical programming skills in a real-world business setting, it was rewarding to see how a task which was previously accomplished manually by humans could now be automated. I have absolutely no regrets taking part in the Summer Industry Program.

The working environment I went into was so welcoming, and the tasks were stimulating. I was encouraged to use new technology and received plenty of support from other staff. This internship has given me clear direction in terms of which path I should take. I highly recommend this program to everyone who is thinking of applying. It is even better to take it for credit by applying through SCIE3255. You will be surprised by how much you will gain from this experience.