Name: Hannah Bruggeman-Ton
Class Year: 2027
Major: Economics  
 
Internship Organization:  Social Sciences & Humanities Research Program at Bryn Mawr College
Internship Title:   Economics Student Research Assistant
Location:  Remote
 
What’s happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!  

My internship position is as a research assistant for Professor Minuk Kim of the Economics Department at Bryn Mawr College. I have been assisting him in gathering and cleaning data on acquisitions and mergers in the liquor industry between large multinational enterprises and small foreign or domestic liquor brands. The intention is to use data on these mergers and acquisitions to analyze their effect on the both the liquor market and consumers. So far this summer I researched mergers and acquisitions which occurred from 2010-2019 and then matched unique product codes to the brands acquired. After that I spent many hours this summer searching the internet to create brand portfolios for these groups at the time of their acquisition’s/mergers. My latest task of the summer has been collection url links to review pages on each of the acquired and portfolio brands, these will then be used to find similarities between the groups existing portfolios and the acquired brand through machine learning.
 
Why did you apply for this internship?  

I applied for this internship since I am an Economics major at Bryn Mawr who is interested in working on economic research.

What has been your favorite part of this internship?  

My favorite part of this internship has been researching the brand portfolios of the major firms in the liquor industry. There is no central database of these portfolios, especially not across time and so I spent a lot of time looking at archived ‘our portfolios’ pages each of which had their own unique and usually liquor themed design spin on the webpage. This was somewhat frustrating from a data collection standpoint, however personally I was having incredible fun. One of my personal favorite pages was an ‘our house of brands’ graphic from Campari that featured a graphic shaped in the outline of a house with contained images of liquor bottles from each of their brands. Incredibly dated, extremely unfriendly to the poor user who is actually trying to figure out what liquor brands the Campari Group owns, and yet so amusing nonetheless.  

 Working remotely for the first time? What has that experience been like for you? 

This internship as involved a lot of firsts for me, including working remotely for the first time in my life. While taking zoom calls from my childhood bedroom isn’t a foreign experience thanks to the pandemic, the independence and responsibility to manage deadlines and decide my work schedule is certainly very new. However, between daily to-do lists, quiet workspaces in the public library, and café visits with my laptop I’ve manage to get myself into a decent routine. One that gets me up before noon and working during the daytime hours which is quite an accomplishment for me, especially during the summer.