From Insights to Impact: A Data Analytics Internship at State Farm

Tell me a little bit about your internship – what was it like as far as the role and the projects?

It was a really fun internship just because I felt like I was doing so many different things at the same time. All the interns within my department were given somewhere between four to seven-ish projects to work on throughout the whole summer. They all had different deadlines, different time commitments. Some of them were solo projects, some of them involved working with other interns. It was really cool because you might be using one subset of skills for one project and then a different subset of skills for another project. As an example of that, for one of my projects I was using Power BI, which is something I've never used before so I was basically forced to learn it for the internship. Another project I was coding in Python. There was a lot of breadth in terms of the projects that I did. 

The internship itself was really great because they scheduled meetings with us and the executives of the organization or with team leaders that we thought might be interesting to follow or learn more about their positions. They scheduled meetings with all the different departments within State Farm just so that if we wanted to think about branching out to another department at some point, we'd have not only those connections, but have that information and knowledge of their experiences. I'd say we had more than a few meetings a week, which was great. And then I actually met up with the head person of my data analytics department once every two weeks, which I thought was really cool just building connections and networking and then asking about what his role is, especially in terms of a leadership position. 

And then State Farm also planned out fun events for us. Towards the end of the internship, we went to Chicken N Pickle and we played pickleball as a whole intern group.  Someone planned sand volleyball just-for-fun meetups every Friday. And then there was happy hour. We were only in office one day a week, which was Wednesdays (you could go in more than that, but all interns were required to be in office on Wednesdays.), so after the Wednesday workday, everyone would just go downstairs to a restaurant and have a happy hour. So I thought that was really fun. 

They definitely provided a lot of opportunities not only to get to know the interns, but also get to know higher-level executives or people with leadership positions within the company. 

Going deeper a little bit, can you walk us through more of what your day-to-day looks like? 

I'd say a typical day we started at 8:00am. It really depends on the number of meetings you have per day. I remember closer to the beginning of the internship, sometimes I would literally have like five meetings in a day and that would just be my whole day. I would go through all those meetings, eat lunch, go through more meetings. Some of them were very informative where you hear about the company, but other ones were Q&A for executives, as I've said before. 

But I'd say towards the latter half of the internship, it was maybe only one or two meetings a day, and you would just be meeting with people that you were working with for your project. So for example, one of the projects I was working with I had a partner who was an intern in the Atlanta, GA office. And so I would meet up with her for about an hour that day and then go back to work and then, have lunch and then maybe have another meeting. And that would be with the full-time employees that were in charge of the project. So I would say it started being a little bit more project-based. You'd meet up with your project supervisor or whoever else you were working on with the project for. And then on a weekly basis, I had both a supervisor and a mentor. I met with them weekly and they were just check-in meetings just to see like, “oh, how am I doing my projects? Do I need anything? Is there any support they can offer me?” My day-to-day would just be like two meetings sometimes, sometimes zero meetings. But if it was one or two meetings then it would be just doing what work I could throughout the day and time-managing throughout all the different projects. 

For anyone who might not exactly know what a data analytics role is all about, can you talk a little bit about just kind of what it is exactly that you did? 

Data analytics in general is basically using data or using quantitative metrics to produce some type of insight or pattern or recommendation for a company to improve their processes or maybe just highlight something that's irregular with whatever numbers they're looking at. 

So in terms of State Farm, State Farm is an insurance company and one of the projects I did was building time series models in Python. So these would be ARIMA models or ESM, which is exponential smoothing models. I was trying to forecast future claims based on different weather variables. So for example, if you have a major hurricane, you're going to have more claims that are filed just because people are getting property damage or vehicle damage or anything like that. So we wanted to try and use different types of weather variables to see how many claims we would get in a specific year based on that. And that was done in Python. 

I would say a lot of data analytics roles want you to have knowledge of Python for sure. And then I would also argue that Excel, Power BI, and SQL are pretty important.

Another one of my projects was in Power BI, and I was learning on the spot. I basically had over 11,000 rows of data on employees within the company. I wanted to measure the different levels of productivity of these employees; these employees were claims employees. The metric that I measured was the number of claims closed per hour. I wanted to see how productive these employees were in terms of that metric, but there were two different levels. We have multiple different claims departments; there are different types of claims. There are property claims, auto claims, personal injury claims. We have a ton of different types of claims, and these employees are all segmented. I wanted to see specifically looking at the injury segment, so if you suffered an injury of some sort. What is the productivity of employees who were hired directly into the injury segment and they had no experience? What is their productivity versus an employee who was hired from another segment and transferred into the injury segment? Let's say an employee who used to do vehicle claims: what is their productivity when they're moved into the injury segment as compared to someone who started off in injury? So just trying to see if there was any difference in terms of how well or how often or how fast they close claims. I made a number of different visualizations in Power BI based on that. 

Then I projected that employees who were moved into an injury segment from another segment were working at a two to three times faster rate compared to if you had no experience. It was just really cool. I got to work in Excel and Power BI, but mainly Power BI. It was really fun because I was able to present my findings, not only to the full-time employee that I was working with, but also their team. It was cool because I was told that the project that I was working on would help guide hiring decisions for 2025, so whatever I did actually had an impact on how the company would run or operate rather than it just being busy work. 

Moving on to the company itself a little bit more, can you talk about what the company culture was like? For any students who might be considering State Farm specifically, is there anything that you feel like they should know about the company in general? 

I would say State Farm is so supportive. All of the people I talked to, all of the employees that I interacted with, they're all so supportive. If you had questions, they're willing to reach out and help. It was really, really easy for me to network with people. Even if I didn't have any connection to them or I didn't really know them, my supervisor or my mentor would connect me with them. Then it would be as easy as, “Hey, I'm a Data Analyst Intern and I'd like to learn more about your role. Would you have a few minutes for a coffee chat?” Everyone that I did that with was super open and answered all my questions and guided me to other people that I could talk to if I wanted. 

I would say one instance of company culture that really stood out to me was during a case competition during the internship. We had a week, as a group, to essentially talk about and research the effects of AI on the insurance industry. We put together a project and then we presented it at the end of the week to a ton of high-ranking executives within different departments. All the feedback from everyone who watched the presentation was really supportive. I had a lot of employees reach out to me individually, whether it was through Teams or through email, saying, “Oh, you did such a great job”, or “You presented this really well.” Then I also had two or three people that personally reached out and was like, “Hey, I'd love to talk to you and learn more about your experience at State Farm and how I can help your career or help you just learn more about the role.” I'd say everyone was super supportive. You just have to reach out and ask. It's really that easy. 

I think everyone, from what I got, really loves their job at State Farm. There are some people that have been working there for 30 years. There are some really long-tenured employees, which says a lot about their employee retention and how well they treat their employees. 

The benefits are really good. I also know that it's really easy to transfer in between departments. State Farm allows you to have that flexibility to transfer. I think that's good for trying new things and advancing yourself. 

Are there any organizations or activities, classes, things like that that you did at SMU that you feel like either introduced you to the industry well or just helped you prepare for the internship? 

When I did this internship, I just finished sophomore year. You have two years of college experience at that point. I would say one of the experiences that I had that really stood out and that they actually asked me about in my interview for them was a data analytics competition that I did in freshman year. It was called DataFest and it was a weekend thing where they give you a data set and then by the end of the weekend, you have to present it and tell a panel of judges what your findings were and what different technical skills you used. I would say participating in DataFest – which is something that SMU has every year, I believe – is something that really made me stand out in terms of not only learning more about data analytics and how to do it, but also in terms of applying for the internship and interviewing for the internship. 

And then you don't really realize it, but the projects that you do in your classes, they seem like just projects, but they're actually kind of useful in terms of having something on your resume and showing like, “Oh, I did this project using SQL” or “Oh, I did this project using Python”. I thought those were all really helpful. One example of that is when I was studying abroad in my spring semester of sophomore year, so right before my internship, I did a project in artificial neural networks and just having that type of experience really helped me in terms of the internship, especially when I was doing my Python-focused project. So I would say take advantage of the projects that you do in your classes. You don't think they might help, but they give you at least some type of idea what is something that could be used in terms of the real world. And then, as I said, DataFest is really useful in terms of learning skills and then having something to talk about. So I think a lot of data analytics is doing projects and really just doing it. I would say sitting in a classroom is great, but you need to be able to like actually put your skills, put your technical softwares to use, and that really shines in terms of doing projects. 

Do you have any last thoughts?

I really enjoyed State Farm. It was great, and at least within my department, they offered essentially the majority of people in my department a full-time role or a returning internship. And so I would say in terms of that, it's pretty good for retention. It was a great company and I enjoyed my experience.