JHP recently caught up with Penn JHP Vice President of Membership, Julia Greitzer to talk about her summer internship at BuzzFeed. From quizzes telling us when we will get married, to food videos we can’t stop watching, to breaking news headlines, BuzzFeed has become one of the most popular sites for gaining information about our world.
Julia’s role as the Research and Data Standards Intern at BuzzFeed has her working specifically with market and brand research and strategics and analytics. She is working on projects day-to-day to present the internal BuzzFeed data. These projects include sending out surveys and questionnaires to the site’s users, like how they are feeling about quizzes on the site, and tapping into other data resources. While other teams are working with clients, research, creating content, and marketing, Julia is analyzing how consumers are taking it all in.
She describes the BuzzFeed company culture just as we would imagine it. “It’s a very inclusive, laid-back office culture. We work at big long tables to encourage collaboration; there’s couches everywhere, and yes, people are riding through the office on Hoverboards.” There is a recurring company-wide meeting, lead by the CEO, so the entire company is kept in the loop about what is going on at the organization as a whole. It’s a very approachable company, even holding an intern event, in which the 30’ish New York interns met with the CEO and heard his life story. Julia says, “Of course, you can Google his story, but to hear it first hand in a cool, intimate setting, makes it that much better.”
While her role is specific, Julia has gotten to taste a little bit of everything that goes on in the BuzzFeed office...literally. Those awesome recipe and food tasting videos that come up in your Facebook feed = she gets the leftovers! “BuzzFeed is such a fun company to work for. It’s great to see how people work to evoke feelings, emotions, and entertainment with the quizzes and lists that I used to think were just fun and silly. And that’s my life at BuzzFeed!”
