I came into my internship at Reach3 Insights expecting a lot of surveys, Excel sheets, and slides.
And there was plenty of that. But looking back, the moments that stuck with me most were the ones that made me notice something I hadn’t been paying attention to before.
During my summer with Reach3’s Toronto-based Pod, I worked across brand experience and brand health tracking projects, from survey QA and data validation to ethnographic coding and client reporting. Somewhere along the way, I started looking at the work a little differently.
The Pause
Ethnographic coding was one of the first things that caught me off guard.
Most of my previous experience had been with quantitative data, so I was used to looking for patterns in numbers. Watching video responses was different. I found myself paying attention to the things that weren’t necessarily captured in the words themselves: a pause before an answer, a change in tone, a facial expression, or a shift in body language.
Those small cues could add another layer to a participant’s response. Sometimes the insight is hidden not in what consumers say but how their body reacts during product consumption.
It was a different way of thinking about data. Not everything meaningful fits neatly into a cell, and sometimes you have to look a little closer to understand the full reaction.
The Pattern
As the summer went on, I started noticing patterns somewhere completely different: in the work itself.
Some of the tasks I was doing — respondent reconciliation, file organization, naming conventions, and data validation — had repetitive manual steps. After doing them a few times, I started wondering: does every part of this really need to be done manually?
That question led me to experiment with automation. For one workflow, I developed a more efficient way to organize and database large amounts of project information, significantly speeding up the process. I also built a significance testing tool to bring several reporting steps into a more standardized process.
I enjoyed that part of the internship more than I expected. There was something satisfying about taking the task I had been given, understanding how it worked, and then asking whether I could make it work better.
It also changed how I look at repetitive work. Sometimes repetition is just part of the job. But sometimes it’s a sign that there might be a better way.
The People
By the end of the summer, I had also started to appreciate something that wasn’t obvious to me when I first arrived: how many people are behind a research project.
Researchers, programmers, data processing specialists, analysts, project managers, and client-facing teams may all touch the same project at different points. I could be validating data one day and helping turn results into charts and summaries another, but my piece was always connected to someone else’s.
That made asking questions feel less like something you do only when you’re unsure and more like part of doing the work well. Understanding where something came from and where it was going next often mattered just as much as completing the task in front of me.
What I’m Taking With Me
I started the summer expecting to learn more about market research. I did. But I also came away paying attention to different things.
A pause in a video response. A repetitive step that could be done better. The person who needs your work after you’re finished with it.
They seem like small things, but they changed how I approached the work.
I came to Reach3 interested in data and analytics. I’m leaving with a better appreciation for everything that sits around the data: the human signals, the processes, and the people that help turn it into something useful.
That’s probably what I’ll remember most about my summer in market research.