Haley DeJulio

Hometown: Pittsburgh, PA

Undergraduate: Harvard University, 2015

Major: Human Evolutionary Biology with a secondary in Economics

Future: I'm considering law school, business school, and graduate programs that focus on behavioral economics and consumer behavior. Ideally, whether I become a lawyer, a consultant, or something else entirely, my career will be closely related to food.

Summer Projects:

I conducted three online studies this summer using Qualtrics, which I worked on with Aner Tal. Two of the studies had been brainstormed previously and passed along to me. One looked at the effect of pictures of unhealthy/indulgent foods in the healthy section of the supermarket on purchases and the other looked at he effect of various symbols (hearts, leaves etc.) on packaging and their effect on health and taste perception. The third online study focused on the effect of menu length on healthfulness of choice, and this was an idea that I came up with on my own.

My major summer project was on Behavioral Event Modeling a bad habit. It involved me reading through and sorting many responses from students in a class at Cornell about modeling chains of events that lead to a certain unwanted behavior, starting from that final behavior and working backward. They also suggested possible points and methods of intervention. This project culminated in a roughly 15-page paper that we are going to try to get published.

I also worked on drafting the IRB for a project on the eating habits of single parent versus two parent households and designed a survey for this as well. I also helped to code data from Reddit responses on one small change that you could make to be healthier, from a study at Hannaford market regarding the Hannaford Guiding Stars program, and from a field study that we conducted at Lansing Market that looked at how chewing gum while shopping affected purchases.

Advice for Future Interns:

The Food and Brand Lab is a one-of-a-kind place with a multitude of enthusiastic and brilliant people working on many different projects and initiatives at any given time. As a result of this dynamic, you will often feel that you are working on so many different projects at once that you won't be able to complete any of them well. To minimize the degree to which this concern becomes a reality, try to meet with your supervisors as often as possible, ask specific questions, don't be afraid to contact people by phone or by email, and utilize any time away from the lab wisely. Ten weeks may seem like ample time to accomplish everything you're assigned and more, but trust me, there is more than enough work to keep you busy the entire time - especially if you want to get everything out of this internship that you can. You can learn so much from being around Dr. Wansink and the rest of the lab, so try to make the most of this opportunity by asking everyone you meet about their experiences and how they got to where they are, getting various perspectives on your potential career goals, brainstorming ideas for your own studies and pitching them, and exploring Ithaca and Cornell. Make sure that you spend time getting to know your fellow interns as well! They tend to be very diverse in terms of educational background, age, and native country, so you can all learn a lot from each other.

Feel free to email me with questions at haley.dejulio@gmail.com.