Meet Yichen Liu, a U of I sophomore majoring in Econometrics & Quant Econ. She first learned about the opportunity through her friends, and Yichen wished to strengthen both her technical and professional skills, especially the collaboration skills, in a real work environment. She is currently completing her first semester as a website content strategy assistant with the Cline Center.
As part of the Website Content Strategy team, Yichen is mainly working on conducting SEO research and structural analysis for the SPOTLITE website, including reviewing metadata, heading hierarchy, crawlability, and AI visibility trends. Analyzing Google Analytics (GA4) data to evaluate SPOTLITE’s user behavior, traffic sources, and engagement patterns. Performing comparative website research to study peer platforms and identify improvements in content structure, usability, and data presentation.
Through her position, Yichen gained technical skills in SEO analysis and Google Analytics through the above working tasks. She also sharpened her soft skills, including communication, time management, and task prioritization during the internship, which helped her to better perform throughout the internship.
What Yichen learned most from her internship is that it is important to approach problems systematically; for example, breaking complex issues into structured components makes analysis more efficient and recommendations more actionable.
Looking ahead, Yichen plans to pursue a career in finance or data science, where she can apply quantitative analysis, data-driven decision-making, and technical problem-solving skills. A fun fact about Yichen is that she went to Alaska during the last winter break.