Olivia Case | fabinternship2013

Hometown: Rochester, NY

Undergraduate: Middlebury College, 2015

Major: Psychology and Music

Interests:

I am a true foodie – when asked if I live to

eat, or eat to live, I will quickly respond that

I live to eat. I grew up experimenting with

concoctions of whichever ingredients I

could find in the house and today consider

cooking and baking to be personal hobbies.

Throughout high school I worked at my local

grocery store where, on one of my first days,

the manager asked what I planned to study

in college. I told him that I was interested in

Psychology and we soon began a

conversationof how Psychology can be applied

in the grocery store setting – combining my two

loves of psychology and food. This conversation

opened my young eyes to fields of Psychology

other than the Clinical Psychology route or the academia route. Attending a small, liberal arts school in New England, these are still the two fields of Psychology that are stressed in the department, preventing me from exploring Consumer Psychology or marketing. I saw the summer internship at the Food and Brand Lab as a chance to explore these other fields and expand my horizons, gaining an understanding of my own interests and possible career paths.

Summer Projects:

Nudging Restaurant Diners: For this project I coded pre-existing tips from experts on how to nudge restaurant diners toward making healthier choices. I used this information to write a paper regarding interventions that may be used in the restaurant environment and the need to personalize these interventions based on the typology of the diner. This paper will hopefully be published in a hospitality journal.

Blueprints: For this project I worked with one of the post-docs in the lab to gather information regarding household kitchen spaces. This involved gathering floor plans from town offices and creating surveys. The information will be used in conjunction with a past survey regarding BMI and living spaces.

Need States: For this project I worked alongside a post-doc, continuing research from a previous year regarding need state substitution. This involved developing Internet studies, completing literature reviews and assisting in the writing of a paper.