The FAECTOR Research Project is the most exciting international study trip that has been a longstanding event organised by the FAECTOR Research Project committee. This trip (actually more of a journey) is focused on ambitious third-year students of Econometrics (and fourth year BSc2 students) that are interested in widening and enriching the perspective of their study.
This study project consists of two parts. The first part is an internship at companies that are interesting for econometricians, which will be arranged by the FAECTOR Research Project Committee. Think about companies within logistics, finance or marketing like Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), de Nederlandse Bank and T-Mobile. When you apply for FAECTOR Research Project you mention your preferences for a specific field in your application. The committee will take all preferences into account when they select the students for the participating companies.
In this article, Martijn van der Linden tells us a little bit more about his internship this year at INK361. He is currently waiting to hear where he is going for the 2-3 week trip next summer. Previous destinations were Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Dubai, Cape Town, Shanghai and New York.
Hi, my name is Martijn and I am part of the FAECTOR Research Project (FRP) of 2017. I did my FRP internship together with Julia Nynke at the marketing company INK361. INK361 aims to provide actionable insights for Instagram users, and in specific, Instagram users that use INK361 its newly launched application Preppr to schedule posts. It was our job to find the optimal time to post and other actionable insights for Preppr users to obtain maximum engagement on their posts. That is, to obtain the maximum number of likes and comments on their posts.
During my time at the internship I mostly stumbled upon the importance of the quality of data. In practice it turned out to be quite hard and rare to get a sample that suffices your needs to apply what you want. The methods and models learned during the first two years of the Econometrics Bachelor were hard to implement, as many of the theoretical assumptions are just not met. This asked much creativity, trial and error, and patience. Distinguishing what is important to report as final insights was quite a search through the large stack of, many times, unsatisfactory results. It all turned out to be quite a reality check that there is still lots to learn, though it is also motivating to see where you can get with the knowledge gathered in the first two years of the econometrics bachelor and how valuable this can be for a company.
A typical day at the office for me included lots of coffee and tea, valuable discussions and friendly conversations with Nynke and the people of INK361, and testing different methods and models on my computer until we obtained satisfactory results.
In overall, an internship like this got me to learn a lot and was an awesome and valuable experience. Therefore I would recommend being a part of the FRP.
You can find more information about the FAECTOR Research Project here. Do you want to organise the FAECTOR Research Project yourself next year? Apply now for the FAECTOR Research Project Committee!