Wayfair

Part of Northeastern’s uniqueness as a school is their well-established coop program, in which students can take up to 6 months off of school to work full-time. For my coop in the spring of 2024, I worked at Wayfair, one of the largest home goods retailers in the world.

I was accepted as a data scientist on their marketing team, for the Google PLA (product listing advertisements) team, and was one of four members managing Wayfair’s largest advertising channel by a large margin. We spent millions of dollars daily on ad bidding for the Google SRP, and worked cross-functionally with other advertising groups such as SEO to optimize visibility and income.

Additionally, although it was outside of the scope of my internship, I ended up taking on a project with a startup called Clarative, which provides integrated NLP querying services for databases. Due to a number of reshuffles at Wayfair, the leadership for the project was repeatedly scattered, and after a couple months I ended up as the person who knew the most about the project on the marketing team. In order to keep the initiative alive, I met with Clarative’s CTO and interfaced with legal, software, and management teams within Wayfair to make sure Clarative was set up to help us access our data more easily, and ended up passing it off to an upper-level employee before I left the company.

Working at Wayfair gave me a lot of insight into how large corporations function, and some great experience with high pressure coding and data wrangling. One wrong excel equation could cost us huge sums, and the precision required was eye-opening. I also improved my communication skills and gained a strong handle on the Google suite of tools for managing data.

That being said, I found the environment to be fairly slow and repetitive, and the mission of the company - selling furniture - wasn’t something I was particularly passionate about. I learned that having constant learning and passion for the vision of the company are both extremely important to me, and I hope to find more of both in my work going forward!